What is Cloud Migration? Strategy, Process, and Tools

June 1, 2023

Topics: Cloud Volumes ONTAP Data Migration Advanced 7 minute read

A cloud migration strategy constitutes an overarching plan outlining the transition of an organization's digital assets—which can include services, databases, IT resources, and applications—from on-premises or co-located infrastructures into a cloud-based environment. This process can be partial or comprehensive, even involving the shift from one cloud platform to another, often referred to as cloud-to-cloud migration.

The execution of a cloud migration strategy typically unfolds in five primary stages: preparation, planning, migration, operation, and optimization. This intricate process is not limited to moving data from local data centers to renowned public cloud service providers like AWS, Google Cloud, or Microsoft Azure; it can also entail moving from one cloud service to another.

For businesses embarking on their initial journey to the cloud, there are several pivotal factors to consider. An effective cloud migration strategy can provide a clear roadmap, ensuring a smooth transition that optimizes the operational efficiencies offered by cloud platforms.

This is part of our series of comprehensive guides about Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS).

In this article, you will learn:

What are the Main Benefits of Migrating to the Cloud?
What are Common Cloud Migration Challenges?
Cloud Migration Strategies
5 Phases of Cloud Transformation
Migrating Data to the Cloud with NetApp Cloud Volumes ONTAP

What are the Main Benefits of Migrating to the Cloud?

Here are some of the benefits that compel organizations to migrate resources to the public cloud:

Scalability
Cloud computing can scale to support larger workloads and more users, much more easily than on-premises infrastructure. In traditional IT environments, companies had to purchase and set up physical servers, software licenses, storage and network equipment to scale up business services.
Cost
Cloud providers offer managed services that lower your operational overhead and simplify maintenance tasks such as upgrades. Companies migrating to the cloud can spend significantly less on IT operations. They can devote more resources to innovation—developing new products or improving existing products.
Performance
Migrating to the cloud can improve performance and end-user experience. Applications and websites hosted in the cloud can easily scale to serve more users or higher throughput, and can run in geographical locations near to end-users, to reduce network latency.
Digital experience
Users can access cloud services and data from anywhere, whether they are employees or customers. This contributes to digital transformation, enables an improved experience for customers, and provides employees with modern, flexible tools.

What are Common Cloud Migration Challenges?

Cloud migrations can be complex and risky. Here are some of the major challenges facing many organizations as they transition resources to the cloud.

Lack of Strategy

Many organizations start migrating to the cloud without devoting sufficient time and attention to their strategy. Successful cloud adoption and implementation requires rigorous end-to-end cloud migration planning. Each application and dataset may have different requirements and considerations, and may require a different approach to cloud migration. The organization must have a clear business case for each workload it migrates to the cloud.

Cost Management

When migrating to the cloud, many organizations have not set clear KPIs to understand what they plan to spend or save after migration. This makes it difficult to understand if migration was successful, from an economic point of view. In addition, cloud environments are dynamic and costs can change rapidly as new services are adopted and application usage grows.

Vendor Lock-In

Vendor lock-in is a common problem for adopters of cloud technology. Cloud providers offer a large variety of services, but many of them cannot be extended to other cloud platforms. Migrating workloads from one cloud to another is a lengthy and costly process. Many organizations start using cloud services, and later find it difficult to switch providers if the current provider doesn't suit their requirements.

Data Security and Compliance

One of the major obstacles to cloud migration is data security and compliance. Cloud services use a shared responsibility model, where they take responsibility for securing the infrastructure, and the customer is responsible for securing data and workloads.

So while the cloud provider may provide robust security measures, it is your organization’s responsibility to configure them correctly and ensure that all services and applications have the appropriate security controls.

The migration process itself presents security risks. Transferring large volumes of data, which may be sensitive, and configuring access controls for applications across different environments, creates significant exposure.

7 Cloud Migration Strategies

There are seven cloud migration strategies: rehosting, redeployment, repackaging, refactoring, repurchasing, retiring, and retaining. These were originally called the “5 Rs” by Gartner, and later expanded to “7 Rs”. Organizations looking to migrate to the cloud should consider which migration strategy best answers their needs. The following is a brief description of each:

Refactor/Re-architect. Transform an application by altering its architecture and leveraging cloud-native features to enhance agility, performance, and scalability. This usually involves porting the operating system and database.
Replatform (Lift and Reshape). Transfer an application to the cloud, incorporating some optimization to benefit from cloud capabilities.
Repurchase (Drop and Shop). Transition to another product, often by adopting a SaaS model instead of a traditional licensing approach.
Rehost (Lift and Shift). Migrate an application to the cloud without implementing changes to utilize cloud features.
Relocate (Hypervisor-Level Lift and Shift). Shift infrastructure to the cloud without the need for new hardware, application rewrites, or adjustments to current operations. Technologies like VMware Cloud enable this migration approach.
Retain (Revisit). Maintain applications in their original environment. This can include applications that need significant refactoring, which can be deferred to a future time, or legacy applications that remain in place due to a lack of business justification for migration.
Retire. Discontinue or eliminate applications that are no longer required in the source environment.

Learn more in our detailed guide to the 7 Rs of Cloud Migration

5 Phases of Cloud Transformation

When considered more broadly, the cloud migration process is called cloud transformation. The cloud transformation process is often broken down into five phases: prepare, plan, migrate, operate, and optimize. These phases provide a holistic approach to moving workloads and data to the cloud, helping to minimize disruption and maximize benefits.

1. Prepare

In the preparation phase, organizations establish their business objectives for cloud migration. These objectives might include increased agility, cost savings, improved performance, or enhanced scalability. In this phase, organizations should perform an initial assessment of their IT infrastructure to understand what resources they have and how these might be migrated. Organizations should also evaluate their cloud readiness, identifying any gaps in skills or technologies that might need to be addressed before migration can occur.

Build a business case for every application you plan to migrate to the cloud, showing an expected total cost of ownership (TCO) on the cloud, compared to current TCO. Use cloud cost calculators to estimate future cloud costs, using realistic assumptions - including the amount and nature of storage used, computing resources, taking into account instance types, operating systems, and specific performance and networking requirements.

2. Plan

Once an organization has established its business objectives and evaluated its cloud readiness, the next phase is to create a detailed migration plan. This plan should include a roadmap for the migration process, detailing which workloads will be migrated and in what order. Organizations should also decide on their preferred cloud architecture and identify any necessary modifications to their existing applications or data. This phase is also the time to address any compliance or security requirements related to the migration.

In this stage it is important to assess your environment and determine the factors that will govern the migration, such as critical application data, legacy data, and application interoperability. It is also necessary to determine your reliance on data: do you have data that needs to be resynced regularly, data compliance requirements to meet, or non-critical data that can possibly be migrated during the first few passes of the migration?

Determining these requirements will help identify which data needs to be migrated and when, if the data needs any scrubbing, the kind of destination volumes to use, and whether you’ll need encryption of the data both at rest and in transit.

3. Migrate

The migrate phase is where the actual process of moving data, applications, and other workloads to the cloud occurs. This phase can involve a variety of techniques, including lift-and-shift (moving an application to the cloud without modification), refactoring (modifying an application to take advantage of cloud-native features), or even completely rebuilding applications. Migrations should be carefully monitored to ensure they are proceeding as planned and that any issues are promptly addressed.

Data migration is a critical part of this process. If your data becomes inaccessible to users during a migration, you risk impacting your business operations. The same is true as you continue to sync and update your systems after the initial migration takes place. Every workload element individually migrated should be proven to work in the new environment before migrating another element. You’ll also need to find a way to synchronize changes that are made to the source data while the migration is ongoing.

4. Operate

Once workloads have been successfully migrated to the cloud, organizations enter the operate phase. This phase involves the management of workloads in the cloud environment, including monitoring performance, managing resources, and maintaining security and compliance. During this phase, organizations should continue to refine their operations based on feedback and performance data, making necessary adjustments to optimize cloud operations.

Apart from real-time monitoring, you should also assess the security of data stored in the cloud to ensure that working in your new environment meets regulatory compliance laws such as HIPAA and GDPR.

Another consideration to keep in mind is meeting ongoing performance and availability benchmarks to ensure your RPO and RTO objectives should they change.

5. Optimize

The final phase of the cloud migration process is optimization. In this phase, organizations look for ways to improve the performance and efficiency of their cloud environment. This can involve refining cloud operations, identifying opportunities for cost savings, and implementing cloud-native features or services to enhance performance. The optimization phase is ongoing, as organizations continually look for ways to improve their cloud operations and drive greater business value.

Learn more about cloud optimization in our detailed guides to:

Each of these phases plays a crucial role in ensuring a successful cloud migration. By following these steps, organizations can minimize risks and disruptions, ensure a smooth transition to the cloud, and maximize the benefits of their cloud investment.

Learn more in our detailed guide to cloud migration phases

Migrating Data to the Cloud with NetApp Cloud Volumes ONTAP

Cloud migrations can be complex and contain a lot of moving parts. One of the most complex aspects of a migration, especially in a large enterprise, is moving and synchronizing large volumes of data.

NetApp’s cloud solutions can help simplify the migration process by providing tools that will help you move and sync data easily, quickly and securely. In this section we will discuss some of the benefits of using.

Faster Transfers, Lower Costs

With Cloud Volumes ONTAP, NetApp provides several tools that help you automate, sync data faster, and secure your data while transitioning to the cloud.

NetApp’s SnapMirror data replication technology gives Cloud Volumes ONTAP a way to seamlessly transition data and workloads into the cloud not just during the initial migration, but onwards with continuous synchronization according to the user’s pre-defined schedules. Cloud Volumes ONTAP storage efficiencies also help reduce network bandwidth costs during migrations by reducing storage footprint, which also accelerates data transfers.

For users of on-premises FAS or AFF ONTAP storage systems, SnapMirror enables you to seamlessly move data to or from the cloud as necessary for ongoing hybrid environment syncs. For migrations that are being carried out from systems that are not both ONTAP, NetApp offers Cloud Sync to carry out the migration between any kind of object-based storage repository.

High Availability with Cloud Volumes ONTAP

This is one of the most important parameters to measure uptime. Some of the biggest cloud migration challenges that can impact your business continuity arise from failing to plan for issues such as drive failures, network misconfigurations, and Availability Zone failures.

The Cloud Volumes HA configuration can help you achieve a recovery point objective (RPO) of zero and a recovery time objective (RTO) of less than 60 seconds. This is possible through the use of a dual-node infrastructure that synchronously writes changes to both nodes during storage operations. This ensures that if one node fails, operations seamlessly transition to the other node, resulting in no downtime from an application or end-user perspective.

These features ensure that your cloud environment is resilient, safe from service disruptions, and able to host critical workloads as well as data migration processes without requiring expensive HA setup on the application side.

Note, this service has a unique configuration in each cloud. To find out more, follow these links for additional details on AWS high availability, Azure high availability architecture, or Google Cloud high availability.

Data Protection

Cloud Volumes ONTAP uses NetApp Snapshot™ technology to create application-aware snapshots that have no performance impact and consume minimal storage space.

Cloud Volumes allows creation of application-aware snapshots that have no performance impact and consume minimal storage space. These snapshots are created in a matter of seconds irrespective of the size of the volume that is being copied. Instead of copying all the data in the system, NetApp Snapshots only copy the data that was changed by manipulating block pointers.

For ongoing migrations, these snapshots are a low-cost and highly efficient way to protect your system. And snapshot creation can also be entirely automated in order to create backups, which for many users has benefits over using native Google Cloud automatic backup or AWS or Azure services for disk backup.

Data Classification

In a migration, it’s crucial to understand which data is moving and where. NetApp BlueXP classification is a data governance and classification tool that can automatically discover, map, classify, and act on enterprise data, wherever it’s stored—on-prem or in the cloud. With BlueXP classification, users gain full visibility and control over data based on automated and AI driven analysis of metadata and data context.

For companies planning migrations, these capabilities are particularly useful in determining where private data you have is stored so you can take the proper precautions to protect it, in light of privacy regulations. It also makes it possible to pinpoint duplicate and stale data so you can carry out clean migration.

Cost Optimization

The major benefits of using Cloud Volumes ONTAP come with its storage efficiency features: thin provisioning, data compression, deduplication, and compaction as well as data tiering, and FlexClone writable clones. The storage efficiency features work in tandem to limit the amount of storage you consume and reduce data in transit costs. All together, these benefits can save a company as much as 50% to 70% in storage and data transfer costs.

Proven Success with Cloud Volumes ONTAP

Many enterprises have successfully used Cloud Volumes ONTAP to help migrate their workloads and achieve storage efficiency and cost savings. Let’s take a look at some of those customers.

AWS

Monash University, the largest university in Australia, used Cloud Volumes ONTAP to carry out an AWS cloud migration strategy. Monash was able to decommission their data centers and completely migrate their entire repository of student data and educational software to AWS storage using Cloud Volumes ONTAP for AWS. Their cloud migration challenges were to do this without impacting their student, business, and research activities. In the words of Monash’s infrastructure leader, Cloud Volumes ONTAP “allowed us to transition to the cloud seamlessly. It enabled us to easily migrate our data and bring the benefits of our onsite NetApp data management and data protection to AWS.”

Azure

Another Cloud Volumes ONTAP success story is a global clothing retailer headquartered in San Francisco. This company maintains five distinct brands of clothing with 3,300 outlets in more than 90 countries worldwide. Their business challenges were adopting a cloud migration strategy to support their brands’ online business which meant finding a way to effectively carry out the cloud migration process and store massive amounts of video and images to the cloud. Cloud Volumes ONTAP for Azure gave them the flexibility their Azure migration strategy required.

Google Cloud

One customer that leveraged Cloud Volumes ONTAP to make their Google Cloud migration a success was a Fortune-500 ranked global healthcare services and products company. Headquartered in the UK, the company has 50,000 employees serving hospitals, pharmacies, physicians, labs, and health systems worldwide.

The company’s move to Google Cloud came as part of a shift to a cloud-first strategy. The goal was to migrate the entirety of the company’s legacy systems to the public cloud. The key to this migration would be a migration platform that could easily transfer data between the existing on-premises data centers and the cloud. Not only was data moving to Google Cloud, but also AWS, so the platform would also need to enable a seamless multicloud experience.

The platform the company chose was Cloud Volumes ONTAP, moving the data to Google Cloud while providing multicloud ease of use, multiprotocol file sharing, and persistent data storage for Kubernetes clusters.

More to Learn About Cloud Migration

Cloud Journey: 6 Stages of Cloud Adoption

A cloud journey is the process of migrating business operations to a remote facility, managed by an external provider, and accessed through the internet. Discover the six stages of a cloud journey: business case, selecting applications, selecting cloud provider, initial adoption, migration, and post-migration.

Cloud Migration Approach: Rehost, Refactor or Replatform?

Cloud migration is the process of moving some or all your digital workloads to the cloud. Before migrating to the cloud, you have to recognize your requirements, assess cloud solutions and options, make an inventory of your existing resources, identify the current level of skills and select an architecture for your new cloud infrastructure.

There are several tried and tested approaches for migrating application workloads to the cloud. The strategies were originally defined in the Gartner “5 Rs” model in 2011. They are: Lift and shift, Refactor, Replatform, Rebuild, Replace.

Cloud Migration Tools: Transferring Your Data with Ease

A good cloud migration strategy requires the use of cloud migrations tools that make it easier to automate and streamline moving data from the existing storage system to the cloud. The major cloud providers have an array of such cloud migration tools available, and there are even more to choose from third-party vendors. Which is right for your data? In this post we look at some of the native cloud migration tools and others, including NetApp’s SnapMirror and Cloud Sync service which can get data to the cloud for use with Cloud Volumes ONTAP.

Cloud Data Integration 101: Benefits, Challenges, and Tools

The cloud offers a more flexible way for enterprises to deploy IT, and they are taking full advantage of that fact: Gartner recently reported that as much as 81% of the companies that are in the public cloud are using more than one service provider. There are many reasons why cloud migration strategy would call for these kinds of multicloud and hybrid approaches, but it creates a new challenge in the form of cloud data integration. With data dispersed over so many closed off repositories, how can users make sure cloud data integration is possible, keeping all of the data synced and shared across the disparate environments? In this post, we’ll discuss cloud data integration in such deployments and how NetApp Cloud Volumes ONTAP can help keep things in check.

Cloud Roadmap: Mapping Out Your Path to the Cloud

A cloud strategy roadmap is a visual communication tool that describes how your organization will migrate to the cloud. Learn about the importance of a cloud roadmap in migration projects, questions you should ask when building your roadmap, and the five key sections of a cloud roadmap.

Top 3 Cloud Adoption Frameworks: Your Path To The Cloud

A cloud adoption framework provides a baseline for organizations to use when mapping out their cloud migration journey. Discover cloud adoption frameworks by AWS, Microsoft, and Google, which provide a structured path to the cloud including both organizational and technical aspects.

Cloud Application Migration: A Practical Guide

Cloud migration helps organizations leverage the benefits of the cloud for their applications, including cost reduction, a higher level of scalability, and quick application updates. Learn about cloud application migration options, common challenges, the application migration process, and managed solutions that can help you migrate to the cloud.

Why Cloud Adoption Fails and 6 Tips for Success

Organizations often choose to adopt new cloud-based systems and services to take advantage of the capabilities offered by cloud service providers (CSPs). Learn how organizations adopt cloud technology, the dangers of cloud adoption, and how to gear your organization for success.

Cloud First Strategy: Challenges, Considerations & Practices

White House CIO Vivek Kundra coined the term “cloud-first”, referring to the practice of preferring the cloud as a first option for building programs and applications. Learn how a cloud first strategy can benefit your organization, what challenges you can expect, and critical best practices for implementing cloud first.

What's New in K8S 1.23?

The last update of 2021 brought some big changes to how Kubernetes works. Kubernetes 1.23 brought with it 47 enhancements to Kubernetes, including a host of stable enhancements, a number of features moving into beta, some all new alpha features, and one notable deprecation.

Find out the details of some of the major changes and how it affects Kubernetes users Kubernetes, particularly when it comes to managing persistent storage.

Cloud Migration Phases: Prepare, Plan, Migrate, Operate, Optimize

Cloud migration phases, also called cloud transformation phases, refer to the stages involved in moving IT infrastructure, applications, and data from on-premises systems to the cloud. The phases of cloud migration are: Prepare, Plan, Migrate, Operate, and Optimize.

See Additional Guides on Key IaaS Topics

Together with our content partners, we have authored in-depth guides on several other topics that can also be useful as you explore the world of IaaS.

What is Cloud Migration? Strategy, Process and Tools

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