Introduction: -

Today’s world Organizations are looking for optimizing the cost around managing and maintaining the infrastructure, however at the same time looking for the services where high end computing, quick scaleable services can be achieved at low cost. To achieve low cost high scaleable services organizations are looking towards Public cloud adoption.

Major reason for any organization to adapt Public cloud is a style of computing where salable and elastic IT-related capabilities are available, Flexible pricing structure including pay as you go service, secure environment, Managed infrastructure services which helps customer control their costs and provides reliable services
Example use case: -  Based on market research, Typically, applications which are web-based are the prime target for to be migrate to public cloud followed by large data lakes used for analytics and research purposes.

web application is quickly gaining popularity and users. To keep up with the growing demand, need the underlying resources to scale-up dynamically. During peak hours, should be able to deploy maximum resources to serve requests, and when demand drops, then should be able to scale-down the unneeded resources to save extra cost. This is possible within a public cloud model.

There could be another scenario wherein some data which is highly confidential, and business cannot afford to store in third-party data center, in this case Hybrid/Multi Cloud model is right fit, and need to decide which application data will be in Public cloud and which will remain in on-premise data center.

Based on the research by Gartner, it assumed that Public cloud market to surpass $300bn by 2021

While there are lot of benefits to move on to Public cloud one thing which surely misses as a service is application portability and migration of data service provided by any public cloud providers. Thing that one need to consider while migrating to public cloud are, as listed below.

•      What is Business needs
•      Right choice of cloud providers and availability  
•      Service models that fulfill the business needs
•      Multi cloud strategy to avoid vendor lock-in
•       Security & compliance as per the company and local governing bodies
•       Cost of migration and tool to be used at long term
•       Adaption of modern technology by existing staff and training them.
•       Changes within Existing Management process to adapt cloud-based technologies.
•       Integration with existing application which are not capable to migrate

       Cloud Migration Challenges

      People and process

When we plan for public cloud migration, the challenge isn’t technology. It’s the existing It staff and processes that must change and adapt. Existing IT personnel are not familiar with public cloud technologies and service model.

·        Right Cloud provider and service model

     Choosing a right cloud provider and services model is one of major challenge for businesses. Some Cloud services model doesn’t fit for legacy applications and highly confidential data.

·        Getting Over the Psychological Barriers

     Psychological Barriers of leadership; Moving company workloads to public cloud is safe? Will the Public cloud secured than on-premise Data center, can cloud provider maintain maximum up-time, how legacy application will be integrating with public cloud.

·        Changing Management

      IT Management are managing their Systems and application from decades. After cloud adoption it tremendous change for them to understand the delivery things.

·        Cost and Time

     This is common question in leadership mind that Cost of migration and tools to be used at long term. Will the provided cost estimation will be accurate, and time for large data migration, can we migrate our data over the internet, Security during migration phase, latency issues during migration?

    Time to Re-architect/Re-engineering legacy applications

    Allocate new budget to get existing IT personnel trained.

    Can we use existing software licences in public cloud?

·        Developing a Migration Strategy and Business Objectives

o   Cloud migration strategy is one of most critical area, whereas we must develop a complete road-map of cloud adoption journey.

·        Security & Compliance

    Security is one of critical area wherein Organizations afraid about their data and information.
Legacy Systems and applications integration with Public Cloud

                              connect legacy systems with newer cloud-based business applications. Some of                                  legacy application cannot be compatible in public cloud and require re-coding or re- architecture

A phased strategy for cloud migration: -

Cloud Assessment-

·        Financial assessment (TCO calculation) Get cost estimation from cloud providers (AWS, Azure, Google) online tools, and compare the existing IT cost. Choosing a cloud provider and service models depends on many factors “Pricing, reliability, Uptime, Application compatibility”

·        Assess on-premise IT infrastructure and challenges “Servers, Storage, Database, systems uptime, network bandwidth, Process gaps etc.

·        Assess all Legacy and critical applications and understand whether Refactoring / Re-architecting is needed

·        Understand criticality and sensitivity of data for any GDPR compliance

·        Review all existing software (MS SQL, Oracle etc.) licences and see the possibility to re-use in public cloud. It will help to save the cost

·        Security and compliance assessment

Proof-of-Concept-

It’s always a great idea to build a small proof of concept (POC) before migrate workload to the cloud. Such models won’t anticipate all possible         issues, but it will give a greater clarity and understanding about the challenges we may face. We can test hosted applications, database and network latency.

Some of things should look for during POC include:

1)     Compare application data performance between on-remise and Public cloud

2)     Address all the real-time challenges of a cloud migration Network challenges faced and needs to be worked out

3)     Reliability

4)     Cloud provider support evaluation

5)     Address Cloud migration tools challenges

Planning-

·        Develop Architecture and Roadmap of cloud migration and choose cost-effective cloud provider (AWS, Azure, Google etc.) and service model (IaaS, PaaS, SaaS)

·        Choose to cost effective and reliable network connectivity solution to migration the workloads. Snowball, direct connect, Azure express route, VPN etc. available in market, however depends on size of database and workloads being migrated.

·        Define project management methods and tools to be used during the migration

·        Plan Strategy of disaster recovery and backup solution

·        Plan automation of all possible tasks using Chef, Ansible, Puppet, PowerShell, Cloud Formation, Terraform etc. Automation not only helps in improving productivity, however also eliminates possibilities of human error.

·        Plan migration of workloads in distinct phases (Staging, Dev & Production) with ITIL practices, it will help to avoid any risk or failure

·        Application migration strategy considering Refactoring / Re-architecting approach

·        Training plan for existing IT personnel in new cloud technologies

·        Harden Security & Compliance – Today’s IT world it very important to define best security framework in the beginning and make sure all data is encrypted and use of IAM, AD policies.

·         Things Needs to Implement while considering Cloud security and Compliance, as below.

a)      Identity and access management policies

b)     VPC security groups Inbound and outbound ports restriction

c)      Data Protection, make sure all data is encrypted

d)     Detective Control

e)     Incident response

f)       Monitoring

Cloud Migration-

·        Once IT infrastructure has been assessed and a planning has been mapped out, next step is executing the cloud migration. And, based on the finalized cloud architecture “Compute, Storage, database, Security frameworks, Network, load balancing” and other base architecture level setup needs to be implemented.

·        As a first step migrate staging & Dev environment to cloud wherein Refactoring / Re-architecting is not required.

·        Once the Staging/Dev environment migration completed then testing and monitoring of applications, databases is needed prior migrating Production workloads to Public cloud.

·        In a next phase first slot of production environment needs to be migrated as per planned strategy. During Production migration phase all the IT stakeholders should be aware about planned migration activity to avoid any concerns.

·        Following example’s needs to consider for Application migration

a)      Re-hosting “Lift and Shift” of server or application from source environment to cloud. Migrated resources may need minimal changes to work in public cloud.

Examples:

                                                    i.      Server’s running packaged software

                                                   ii.     Applications without an active roadmap

                                                  iii.     Ad hoc, dev and test environments

b)     Re-platforming “Lift, Tinker and Shift” changing the platform as part of cloud migration. make a few cloud optimizations. Core architecture changes of application doesn’t require.

Example:

                                                    i.     Changing the OS or DB engine.

                                                   ii.     Upgrading to the latest release of an application

                                                  iii.     Upgrading the OS from windows 2008 to windows 2012/2016

                                                  iv.     Upgrading from Oracle 8 to Oracle 11

                                                   v.     Changing from RISC to x86

c)      Refactoring / Re-architecting – reimage complete application architecture and develop using cloud-native tools. In this scenario there would be strong business requirement to add features, scale or performance, which is not possible in on-premise environment.

d)     Re-perchance -  Migrate from over-lasting licenses to SaaS model.

Example

                                                    i.      CRM to Salesforce.

e)     Retire – Decommission application that are no longer needed, which was found during discovery and assessment phase.

                                                    i.     Example

                                                   ii.     Exchange 2013 to office 365

                                                  iii.     Upgrade from Older ticketing tool to ServiceNow

·        Validation of all replicated workloads prior to failover activity and Test failover once the replication completed

·        Once the final fail-over completed, prepare to connect migrated resources. Testing and validation is required of all resources with the help of application owner.

     Operations and Optimization: -

·        Once the Cloud migration completed, it is important to ensure that, it is optimized, secure, and easily retrievable. apart from Monitoring and Optimization need to make sure new cloud environment meets regulatory compliance laws as per the company and local governing bodies

·        Enable 24x7 operation support (by on-boarding of engineers on different shifts) and monitoring for all Cloud resources and applications using any recommended tools (Nagios, pager duty, datadog, Cloud watch, azure monitor, Stackdriver) etc.

·        Operation support include “Service Monitoring, Application performance monitoring, Resource Inventory Management, Release/change Management, Reporting and analytics, Business continuity/ Disaster recovery, IT Service catalog”

·        Needs to make sure required IAM polices are configured and privileges are granted as per roles, to avoid any security breaches

·        Since all data is stored in cloud, we ensure that all the layers adopt the encryption.

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

·        Track all uses of Cloud resources and enable billing analysis accordingly. Enable monthly billing cap, if require and Avoid or eliminate unneeded cost or sub-optimal resources.

Major Benefits of Public Cloud Adoption: -

·        Cost Effectiveness (Capex to Opex) – Flexible pricing structure is one of the top benefit of the public cloud. Most of the public cloud providers give businesses flexibility pay-as-you-go.
       It helps businesses, to tightly control their costs by paying for the infrastructure only based on their uses.

·        Scalability & Flexibility – We can expand our IT infrastructure globally in minutes with no up-front cost and no dependency on vendor.

·        Benefits of latest technology – Public cloud providers keeps their Infrastructure and software up to date and that benefits directly to customers to meet their compliance level.

·        Maximum Uptime and Zero Risk Failure- Almost, All Cloud providers guarantee more than 99% uptime and zero risk failure. Since cloud providers have matured and stable infrastructure with multi region and availability zones.

·        Security- does not change the approach on how to manage security from preventive to detective and corrective actions. It does however give the ability to perform these activities in a more agile manner. Cloud provider implement best security systems and hire world best security expert to manage their systems.

·        Gartner Forecasts Worldwide Public Cloud Revenue to Grow 17.3 Percent in 2019

Conclusion: -

We have introduced both the preparation and execution steps required for migration to the public cloud.
Assessment of existing environment, building a plan, and iterating the work breaks a large migration into manageable activities for efficient execution.

Public Cloud brings scalability, Elasticity, Agility and reliability to the organizations’ take advantages of the benefits of the Public Cloud, Organizations should follow a phase-driven migration strategy. Whether it is a typical 3-tier web application, nightly batch process, or complex back-end processing workflow. Most applications can be moved to the public cloud.

The organization must take in consideration what kind of Data, applications they have and what result they aim to achieve with the Cloud migration. Decisions made by the organization will determine the choice of methodology and how the migration will be executed.

The blueprint in this Blog offers a proven step by step approach and best practices to public cloud migration.