Cloud migration can be easy if you plan it and understand how cloud works
Cloud vs. On-premises
Both cloud and on-premises are just servers that act as compute resources but very different in approach, maintenance and information security.
For example, when your company have their own servers farm (it can be a server room in the office or at a hosted facility) the amount of maintenance is extremely high compares to cloud.
Some of the maintenance tasks can be:
- Physical alarm system
- Air conditioning monitoring
- Operating network devices (switches, routers and firewalls)
- Local backup and remote backup
- Hardware maintenance (servers)
- Operating local cloud (hypervisors & VM’s)
- etc
For cloud it’s mostly:
- Operating services
- Optimizing billing
- Cloud security
- Automation
- etc
It’s very different and that is why companies struggle with migrating their compute infrastructure to the cloud.
Cloud approach vs. On-premises approach
The main reason companies struggle to do an easy migration to the cloud is approach, they think that what worked with on-premises will work in the cloud too.
The two main positions for those two approaches are cloud engineer and system administrators, and both come from a different background (but that’s on a separate blog post).
The mindset of On-premises and Cloud correlates with production or non-production operation of the company, usually companies that have on-premises does not have production environment (but some do have production). and most of the companies that use the cloud have a product in production environment (some don’t).
So the approach is production vs. non-production and mainly how to deploy a software fast and reliable to the compute resources in the cloud.
How to have a successful and easy migration?
Understand the approach is very different between cloud and on-premises (that’s why DevOps was invented).
Train or hire cloud engineers that understand DevOps approach.
Get a cloud architect to lead the cloud migration project (verify the cloud architect credentials and experience before hiring them!).
Understand that this kind of project is not cheap and will require a budget.
To Learn more about cloud migration you can download the cloud-migration PDF HERE