Cloud Migration Checklist: 10 Steps to Successful App Migration

​Cloud migration has become a new trend with businesses shifting their data on the platform.
According to a survey, 83% of businesses have shifted to the cloud platform by the end of 2020.

Cloud migration can be done by all kinds of businesses, regardless of their size. It offers a reliable, secure, and scalable platform to an enterprise.

The following article is a step-by-step guide that will help your business migrate from on-premise to a cloud platform.
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But,

​Why should you switch to a cloud platform?

• Secure: Cloud is more secure than all other traditional platforms.
  In a survey conducted by Microsoft Office 365, it was concluded that 94% of SMBs found the cloud as a secure online space to store all their business data.
  Most cloud service providers keep user security as their primary goal.
  
  
• Scalability: The Cloud platform allows you to scale-up and down according to your business requirement. You can adapt to new market changes without feeling chained with your network assets.
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• Cost-effective: Switching to a cloud platform will help you reduce all your extra operational costs. In the cloud, you only pay for the services your business consumes.
  Another survey done by Microsoft Office 365 quotes that 82% of SMBs felt a reduction in their cost, and 70% have re-invested that money into the business.

Step-by-step Guide on how to Migrate on the Cloud

1. Define the horizon of your cloud migration

Your first step towards a successful migration is evaluating your application. You must bifurcate the application into the valuable and non-valuable pile.
The software used in the application should comply with the cloud platform. If all this feels overwhelming, you can use the TIME quadrant.

Here is how it works:

• Tolerate: This quadrant includes all those apps that neither provide value to your business, nor you can move them into an online space.
  
  
• Invest: Put all those apps that offer high value to your business but require some adjustment to produce maximum output.
  
  
• Migrate: Some apps are valuable to the business and do not require any extensive changes.
  
  
• Eliminate: Ditch all apps that do not add any value to your business nor produce output even with high investment.
  
  

Make sure all these applications are not negatively connected. For instance, migrating an app must not affect the functionality of any other application.

2. Set parameters to define cloud migration success

Before actually migrating to the cloud platform, you must set definite and measurable Key Performance Indicators (KPI).

These are some of the parameters your business has to achieve after successfully migrating to the cloud. The KPIs will help you identify all the shortcomings and establish a definite plan to work on.

These are some of the KPIs you can set for your business:

• Overall uptime is the total percentage of time your application was accessible to the end-users.
• Average Response Time is the time taken by the server to give a response to the action made by a user on the application.
• Peak Response Time is the longest time the server takes to respond at a specific time or occasion
• Hardware cost
• Error rates and types
• Memory and CPU usage
• Network latency is the delay made to a user’s request by the server
• Monthly billing
• Staffing cost
• External cost for storage, electricity, etc., and many more
  
  

3. Choose between Multi-cloud or Single cloud environment

This is the most important step that will set up the base for your cloud-based business. You can either choose between multi-cloud or a single cloud platform.

A multi-cloud platform is setting up applications on different cloud providers, whereas a single cloud is purely dedicated to a single provider.

Select a type after carefully analyzing both the platforms. The next step is to ask your developers to integrate all your applications with the chosen cloud API.

But, make sure you select the most appropriate cloud type because once all these changes are made, it will be very time-consuming for an application to switch to another platform.

The multi-cloud platform is of three types:

• Separate cloud for different applications
• Splitting up your application and running in varied clouds
• Using multiple cloud platforms simultaneously

4. Select the most suitable cloud provider

After you have selected a suitable cloud type, your next step is to choose a cloud service provider that complies efficiently with your business.

You can go with any of the three mentioned below:

• Amazon Web Services (AWS): It is a market leader that offers expertise services, including networking, storage, content delivery, machine learning, and analytics.
  The platform is easy to use and simplifies the process of migration. AWS is trustful, reliable, secure, and scalable; all the basic things you need.
  
  
• Microsoft Azure: The platform offers an uptime of 99.95% and ensures maximum security. But you need expert IT professionals to manage the cloud system efficiently.
  
  
• Google Cloud Platform (GCP): It is a cost-effective platform that offers high performance and stores data needlessly. You can perform live migration without worrying about downtime.

5. Identify the extent of cloud integration

When you migrate your applications on the cloud platform, there can be two levels of integration.

• Shallow cloud integration: It is also known as “lift and shift”. This is when you migrate an on-premise application to the selected cloud platform without making any changes. You do not exploit any extra features offered by the cloud provider.
  
  
• Deep cloud integration: In this, the developers not only migrate applications online but also make use of all the services offered by the platform. Again, you need IT experts to perform this operation.

6. Establish a performance baseline for your application

Migrating your application is itself a complicated process. Hence, you need proper guidelines to measure the performance of your decision.
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It becomes a necessity to set performance baselines for all the KPIs mentioned above. It will help you analyze the post-migration performance and identify the areas which need improvement.

You must also decide the duration of your measurement. If you go for a short period (like a day), you will be able to conclude faster, but the data might differ from reality. To get accurate results, you must collect data for a significant period and then analyze results accordingly.

7. Come-up with a structured data migration plan

It is difficult to sync cloud platform with on-premise application majorly because of these problems:

• When you have moved your application to the cloud, but the data-access is still available on-premise
• Or, maybe the service access is on the cloud, but your application isn’t.

What can you do now?

• Shift all the data of your consumers on the cloud platform,
• Cut-off all the connections with the on-premise platform eventually
• Allow your data consumers to only connect to the cloud data, and
• When the situation is under control, you can disable the on-premise version.

8. Automate migration

Migration is not an easy process; you need to perform heavy data transfers that require expert guidance. Multiple tools help an organization increase the speed of migration, lower migration costs, and reduce all kinds of migration risk.

Using an advanced migration tool increases the success rate of migration. You can choose any of the service providers mentioned above, keeping in mind your business requirement. It will replace a lot of manual work and allow your IT professionals to manage the cloud environment easily.

9. Test your cloud migration strategy

Before migrating all your data to the cloud, you must test and analyze the performance of your application. It will highlight all the difficulties your cloud platform might be facing.
To conduct a test migration:

• Establish your cloud platform
• Identify the data or app that you want to transfer
• Migrate the selected data to the cloud
• Measures the performance
• Make all the changes required and check the insights
• You are now ready to migrate
  
  

10. Migrate

After all the above-mentioned steps are complete, you can now migrate all your heavy loaded data into your cloud platform. Make sure you evaluate all the KPI parameters and ask your IT experts to keep an eye on the cloud environment.

Conclusion
Cloud migration can be your first step towards adopting a technology that is secure and cost-effective. It is surely a complex procedure, but you can easily switch all your data by following all the step-by-step guidelines correctly as mentioned above.
​Contact the App-Scoop Vancouver Mobile App Developers for further details.