Before the pandemic, many business owners were on the fence regarding cloud adoption. After all, many of them had invested a lot to build and maintain their on-premises IT infrastructure. The big question back then was: Is cloud computing really worth the hype?
But Covid-19 changed everything. The lockdowns made businesses realize the limitations of on-premises infrastructure and the difficulty of accessing and managing IT services when people couldn’t physically go to the office to connect to the office network. The need for anywhere access and the importance of making digital services readily available to employees and customers was brought to light.
The sudden openness to cloud computing has been remarkable. A recent survey commissioned by Alibaba Cloud revealed that 94% of Philippine enterprises recognize the importance of cloud-based solutions as a way of riding out the pandemic and moving forward to the new normal.
If your business is among the 94%, here’s how you can start migrating your on-premises workloads to the cloud:
Getting started with cloud migration
- Start with a Plan
Draw up your migration plan. It should spell out why you are migrating specific workloads, an analysis of the workloads that will be migrated, your timelines, and the methods you plan to use. Consider the following in your plan:
- The Business Value of Migration – What are your motivations for cloud adoption? What are your expected business results? Reasons for cloud migration often include accelerating resource delivery, increasing business agility, reducing costs or shifting from the CAPEX to OPEX model, taking advantage of the latest cloud technologies, the ability to scale infrastructure real-time, and enhancing service security.
- Workload Analysis – Which workloads can be prioritized for migration? How many VMs will you migrate? First-time cloud users can opt to move smaller, lower-risk applications initially, such as email or the company website, before migrating more complex and business-critical applications. It’s also important to know how long it will take you to perform the migration and how much downtime you can afford and justify.
- Cost Analysis – Analyze current expenses vs. the estimated Total Cost of Ownership when transitioning to a cloud model. Shifting to the cloud can result in reduced IT expenditures and maintenance costs vs on-premises infrastructure.
- Operating Model Review – You need to anticipate and assess risks concerning security and compliance, plan your overall solution and strategy, and align them with your organization’s business rules for IT governance.
- Manpower Skillset Review – Cloud engineers need to have a good understanding of your on-premise infrastructure and the cloud platform you will be using. You can opt to train your current staff or hire a partner that already has the expertise and experience. You can visit the Alibaba Cloud Academy to access comprehensive training and certification resources.
2. Determine your migration approach
- Lift and Shift
Lift and Shift is often considered the simplest approach to cloud migration. You won’t need to change or rewrite code since you will just take the entire application from its old infrastructure and move it to the cloud. With this method, it may even be possible to reduce total spend by allocating new VMs on the cloud with smaller capacity (lower CPU core count, lower memory allocation) than their equivalent on-premise systems.
- Replatform
A “Replatform” migration is the middle ground between Lift and Shift and Refactoring. It is similar to the Lift and Shift model in that the code need not be excessively altered. However, replatforming involves modification to take advantage of the new cloud infrastructure.
Common modifications performed during replatforming include modifying the way an app interacts with the database to benefit from automation and adding more power cloud database infrastructure. You can also add new features to enable better scaling and allow the app to benefit from the reserved resources of your cloud environment. There are even ways to integrate the app with native features of the cloud while keeping the modifications to your application’s code to a minimum.
- Refactor
In refactoring (or repackaging), we change an application’s architecture to take better advantage of the benefits of the cloud. It involves a complete re-architecting of the app to suit the new cloud environment better. The app itself and a large proportion of its code are modified to take advantage of cloud-based features and the extra flexibility that comes with them.
3. Manage risk with a phased approach
- Testing and Development
Select which environment or application to migrate to the cloud. First-timers typically choose a smaller, non‑mission-critical application. At this stage, opting for Pay-As-You-Go (post‑pay) billing gives you the flexibility to delete or recreate resources as needed.
- Staging
It’s best practice to have separate development and staging environments so that your development team can have the freedom to work on new features without being interrupted by testing activity. A staging phase also gives you a dedicated environment for bug replication and fixing and load or performance testing.
- Production
It’s important to understand how your system works in production. You must also consider your Backup and Disaster Recovery systems and Security. Note that while cloud providers are responsible for securing the cloud platform, users are responsible for securing the systems deployed on the platform.
4. Partner with a proven cloud services provider
Alibaba Cloud is the only cloud vendor with a data center in the Philippines and ranks first among cloud providers in Asia Pacific, according to Gartner (Gartner, IT Services worldwide 22 April 2021). Low latency and ready availability of its global security products are but two of the many advantages of Alibaba Cloud’s local presence.
Whether you are a small business or an established conglomerate wanting to take advantage of the vast opportunities offered by the cloud, Alibaba Cloud will have something to meet your needs.
Take advantage of Alibaba Cloud’s March Mega Sale to get special offers with up to 95% off cloud services, and $15 coupons for new users. Visit ph.alibabacloud.com now.
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Download the Migration to Alibaba Cloud White Paper here
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