11 Expert tips for successful enterprise cloud migration

From truly understanding the architecture of the application you wish to create to checking metrics and examining user experience, this article covers all you need to know for your enterprise’s cloud migration condensed into 11 tips collated by industry experts.

Technologies once relegated to the pages of science fiction novels—artificial intelligence, digital currency, and self-driving cars to name a few—have become a reality. Enterprises must innovate with high velocity and at a massive scale to stay competitive. Cloud adoption has become a strategic imperative for enterprises—it's the price required to transform into a digital business.

Given the importance of the process in the evolving situation of the new normal, it is essential first to understand what cloud migration means.

The process of moving digital business operations to the cloud is termed as cloud migration. Here "the cloud" refers to servers accessible over the internet and the databases and software that run on said servers. With cloud computing, the result of cloud migration, enterprises are no longer tasked with managing physical servers or running software applications on their machines.

The cloud computing market is expected to reach USD 2321.1 Billion by 2032, reaching a registered CAGR of 16% from 2023 to 2032, according to stats by GlobeNewswire.

Cloud migration is not just moving to a cloud-based hosting environment. Understanding the cloud service and its product offerings well and utilizing them to benefit the cloud application is imperative. Utilization of Content delivery networks, serverless hosting environs, cloud storage, load balancers, and auto scaling features all play crucial roles in making your application future-ready.

Like any technological solution, the cloud is not full proof. Your organization might face many challenges along the way.

Fortunately, drawing from our extensive experience as a cloud application development company, we’ve got you covered

1. Truly understand the architecture of your application

Applications are critical to your business success, but they don't exist in a vacuum—they run on physical, virtual servers and containers, communicate across networks, sit behind firewalls, query databases, rely on middleware and interact with 3rd party systems using APIs. It is important to create a comprehensive understanding of your applications' architecture—every component, dependency, and integration—before considering a cloud migration. Performing a cloud migration without a detailed understanding of how your application is designed and built, the environment it operates in, and how it performs is risky and leads to costly overprovisioning and avoidable outages.

2. Fix performance issues before you move to the cloud

Before you move to the cloud, investigate and fix noisy alerts, eliminate false positives, optimize slow database queries, and smooth over erratic response times. Successfully migrating a healthy application to a new environment is a challenging engineering endeavor on its own. Migrating an application that shows signs of wear and tear is a recipe for disaster. By giving your application a tune-up before moving it to the cloud, you can avoid outages and save your team from late-night heroics.

According to the Flexera 2020 State of the Cloud Report, 93% of enterprises have a multi-cloud strategy; while 87% have a hybrid cloud strategy.

Do you know, In 2020, 93% of enterprises have a multi-cloud strategy; while 87% have a hybrid cloud strategy. Click To Tweet

3. Know how your users gain value from applications

While understanding technical performance is vital, knowing how users actually use and derive value from your applications is paramount. As you prepare to embark on your cloud journey, take time to engage your users - whether they are employees who use internal applications to perform their job functions or customers that depend on your applications to access digital services. Combine your research with user or customer journey mapping and key transaction discovery to gain a holistic understanding of the value an application and associated services provided.

4. Check that it's easy to access key cloud provider metrics

While cloud vendors provide programmatic access to a rich set of metrics and event streams, which allow you to automatically detect and respond to changes, these metrics are often not in the context of the overall application's performance or business value. Because most traditional monitoring tools have limited or no support for the new class of metrics generated by cloud infrastructure, it's important to choose a performance monitoring solution that not only understands the cloud services being utilized but also integrates and correlates these metrics with the application and user experience.

5. Check user experience during the pilot

During the first phases of migration, it's vital to not impact your customers with performance or availability issues. This can derail migration activity and dent executive confidence. Put simply; your users should haven't any idea the appliance moved to a replacement environment. You should also demonstrate success early within the process, to inspire the assumption and enthusiasm required to propel a cloud migration of enterprise magnitude forward.

6. Prove that the migration was successful

Even after your initial migration effort, and with no noticeable issues, it's important to plan ways to demonstrate the advantages of the cloud, both pre- and post-move. From a technical perspective, show the new application architecture which Service Level Agreements are being adhered to; how you'll configure auto-scaling to soak up unpredictable traffic spikes; how server response times remain unchanged or may be improved; and the way taking advantage of multiple regions around the world reduces latency and improves the user experience. Be sure to also demonstrate the advantages from a business perspective, especially for customer-facing applications. Show how engagement and conversion improve alongside response times for key customer journeys through the appliance.

7. Realize that cloud-based applications require modern monitoring

As you re-architect and extend applications for the cloud, you will make use of many cloud provider services, such as container orchestration for microservices, cloud load balancing, auto-scaling, blob storage, managed NoSQL databases, message queues, and more. Being in the cloud doesn't reduce the need for monitoring. In fact, the cloud demands a modern performance monitoring solution that understands the dynamic, ephemeral, and diverse nature of cloud workloads.

As per Forbes, 83% Of Enterprise Workloads Will Be On The Cloud By 2020. Click To Tweet

8. Prepare to use cloud bursting for instant scalability

One of the major benefits of the cloud is the ability to scale up or down instantly. Cloud bursting may be a technique that permits on-premise applications to provide additional resources during a public cloud when additional capacity isn't available on-site, especially during times of peak demand (such as Black Friday). By routing overflow traffic straight to the public cloud automatically, cloud bursting is a reliable method to prevent service interruptions for users.

9. Ensure that your applications drive business outcomes

Whether your applications run in the cloud, on-premises, or in a hybrid environment, they must continue to fuel growth through rapid innovation combined with significant operational efficiencies. So don't analyze cloud performance metrics in a vacuum. Not only is it important to correlate your apps' performance metrics with customer engagement and revenue growth objectives, but it's also necessary to supply proper attribution to your variable cloud costs, especially with every new feature release. The primary motivation for enterprises to maneuver to the cloud is to accelerate growth through increased agility, unlimited scalability, and reduced costs—so ensure applications get these benefits.

10. Plan for a multi-cloud strategy

There is no pre-defined path to cloud nirvana. That's why a multi-cloud strategy is essential. Every cloud has unique benefits and drawbacks, but unlike traditional data centers, you don't have to go all-in on a single cloud provider, nor should you. Enterprises have every kind of application imaginable: static, compiled languages like Java; dynamic, interpreted languages such as Node.js; web, mobile, and internet of things (IoT)-based apps; big data, machine learning and artificial intelligence algorithms; ephemeral, elastic build clusters; high-performance legacy, monolithic, and transactional business applications; distributed, fault-tolerant, highly-available, global scale social apps. By adopting a multi-cloud strategy, you'll leverage different clouds for various applications and workloads.

11. Assess Security

Uninformed migration from an intranet environment to the cloud may lead to security risks like compliance violations, identity theft, malware infections, data breaches, and diminished customer trust that may lead to potential revenue loss. Choosing a capable cloud service provider is imperative as such a partner will assuredly provide multiple ways to manage the security of your applications. But in addition to choosing such a partner, your enterprise needs to garner the right knowledge through research and professional consultations to ensure that all best practices are being followed to keep your application secure.

Equipped with these 11 tips, we hope you can start realizing the full potential of the cloud for your enterprise. Whether you migrate a pilot application, bring in a team of solutions architects, or task your tech leads with building a cloud competency, these principles and practices can guide you through a cloud migration that transforms your business and delights your customers.

With years of experience backing us up in regards to helping clients in their transformative journey of adopting cloud technologies with custom cloud solutions, Radixweb is a leading cloud-based application development company that can assist you with premium cloud migration services.

Interested? Contact us for a brief about how we at Radixweb can help you in your migration to the cloud.