Business and technology are intertwined, and this is why most companies are moving their infrastructure, be it applications, data, or other elements, to the cloud. This move is called cloud migration, and it helps businesses enjoy several advantages, including flexibility, cost control, and managed services. A typical cloud migration strategy adopted by businesses is rehost migration.
Before implementing a rehost migration, there are specific operational and process practices that you must observe for your cloud migration to be a success. Otherwise, you won’t enjoy the benefits that come with cloud migration.
What Is Rehost Migration?
It’s best to get an overview of what’s rehost migration before going any further. This cloud migration strategy, also called the lift and shift, means transferring your existing applications and data into the cloud without changing its architecture and code. Therefore, the applications and data don’t undergo even the slightest change.
This is a cheaper approach, which is why it’s often adopted by most startups that still haven’t familiarized themselves with cloud migration. Because of this, it’s a lot easier to implement compared to other cloud migration techniques, and executing it typically takes the least duration. If this is convincing enough to consider rehosting, click here for data center migration services.
What Are The Best Practices For Rehost Migration?
Now that you know what rehost migration is, it’s time to understand what the best practices there are, and these include:
1. Carry Out An Extensive Discovery And Eradication Exercise
Before you embark on your rehost migration strategy either to public, private, or hybrid cloud, ensure you understand your company’s current applications and infrastructure fully. Doing this allows you to determine the applications and infrastructure that need to be retired, those to be migrated, and the challenges you’ll face during the migration process. Failure to understand this is one of the primary reasons why rehost migration for many isn’t successful.
You also need to examine the complexity of applications to be migrated. This is especially crucial because those with greater dependencies are often the most difficult to move. As a result, this necessitates that the cloud migration is done in phases.
2. Create A Governance Framework
Most companies are hesitant about cloud migration due to security and compliance concerns. If you also share such worries, it’s best to develop a clear cloud-based governance framework that propels your business towards adopting rehost migration without compromising security. This is a considerable concern, especially when you factor in the risks linked with trusting sensitive company data and applications to third-party providers.
Therefore, you should create an exhaustive cloud governance framework that incorporates principles, decision frameworks, structures, policies, plans, measures, and roles and responsibilities. In addition, it should outline things such as competencies, skills, procedures, and tools. This will help streamline cloud migration by reducing the risk and maximizing its value.
3. Train Your Staff In Advance
Executing a successful cloud migration journey depends on the available expertise to execute this process. Otherwise, there might be a skill gap that consequently hampers cloud migration. This is why you must train your in-house staff during cloud migration to work with a particular cloud provider when moving from the legacy infrastructure.
The training of your staff shouldn’t be a one-off event and should instead be done regularly. This is necessary because of the continuous updates implemented, so you need to ensure that your employees are well informed about the latest updates. As a result, they’ll always be better-placed promptly to implement new ways of conducting things. Because training takes time, you should consider working with a managed IT service provider to help ease the cloud migration process.
4. Focus On Automation
The last thing you want during rehost migration is repeated service disruptions or downtime, as these negatively affect the overall efficiency of this entire process. Because many patterns will be repeated during cloud migration, it’s advisable to automate them. This will help make the entire process more consistent and reduce the cloud migration time. It will also spread automation across the entire cloud migration, which helps everyone see the real value of this process.
Takeaway
It’s hard to overlook the numerous benefits of cloud migration if you want your business to continue having a competitive edge. With that said, making the transition to rehost migration isn’t a mean feat and one that needs extensive planning for a successful implementation. This is why you need to follow the best practices discussed in this article so you can better strategize for your planned rehost migration.