Cloud adoption can be a transformative journey for businesses, offering scalability, agility, and cost-efficiency. Here are seven essential steps to successfully adopt cloud technology
Making the Journey_ 7 Essential Steps to Cloud Adoption.pdf
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CLOUD
MAKING THE JOURNEY: 7 ESSENTIAL STEPS
TO CLOUD ADOPTION
Step 1 – Build a Cloud Roadmap:
One of the main issues organisations face when moving to the cloud is prioritising applications
for migration. There are multiple approaches to take here, for example:
You can identify your low business impact applications first, followed by medium business
impact and high business impact applications, or
You can migrate applications as they are, without any re-platforming or refactoring first.
Whichever approach you take, you need to analyse the application architectures, understand the
application dependencies, identify the risks involved and migrate with a clear roadmap.
Step 2 – Cloud Setup, Licensing, and Governance:
Once you have a clear plan, you should identify the resources you need to manage your
applications in the cloud. For example, for applications that you want to move as-is (i.e., without
modification), run performance counters to identify peak loads on CPU, IO, Network and Storage.
Select the right cloud instances based on this data. Make sure you determine which licensing
model makes the most sense for your business. Pay-as-you-go models may give you the flexibility,
but if you can predict your demand for the year upfront, reserving instances for a one or three-year
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period will save you money. In addition to direct licensing, you can purchase Azure through a cloud
service provider that can provide additional value and cost savings. If you move your data using
cloud-native services like SQL Azure or AWS RDS, be aware of all available options. Consider how
you will set up your connectivity from on-premises to the cloud, your bandwidth and service level
requirements, and choose the ‘best-fit options.
Step 3 – Define the Migration Process:
Align your migration strategy to your customised migration process and tailor it to each customer
environment. The first step in migration is to create your subscriptions or accounts in your chosen
public cloud and set up the right identity and access policies (e.g., IAM roles in the case of AWS
and Azure AD in the case of Azure), including:
1. Designing the best fit governance model using Identity and access management
2. Designing and implementing SSO and MFA
3. Implementing conditional access policies
4. Creating the right resource groups and set up the appropriate resource tagging policies.
Step 4 – Plan for code refactoring
As you migrate your workloads, you may require some refactoring, especially if you are using
applications or services that are not supported anymore. For example, suppose your applications
use unsupported databases, authentication or business services. In that case, you may want to
refactor those apps to use equivalent cloud services provided by the same or other vendors. It
would help if you also refactored applications to make use of containers. Having your applications
refactored makes it easy for your organisation to scale and manage microservices and gives you
better agility.
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Step 5 – Modernise Apps
Public cloud providers offer native cloud services that allow you to build highly scalable and
readily available applications. They operate under a subscription model, so you are only paying for
what you use of these native services. Once you migrate your applications as they are, you can
look at opportunities to modernise your applications for the cloud stack to improve performance
and scalability. The key activities in application modernisation are:
Architecting and designing enterprise applications for cloud PaaS service to achieve high
availability and ease of management,
Refactoring the application code to the target cloud solution,
Data modernisation, including upgrading data solutions to SQL, NoSQL, and document DB,
Building Data Factory solutions to move data across sources,
Building, orchestrating, and managing microservices,
Modernising applications to leverage serverless functionality and achieve better availability
and cost savings.
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Step 6 – Establish Managed Services
Once the migration is complete, there must be a clear post-migration transition back to day-to-day
operations, including support. Additionally, it will be well worth your time to have proactive
monitoring and response levels in place to ensure that everything is operating as planned. The
next step after migrating the VMs/Applications is to manage them. At this step, you need a
“single-pane-of-glass” deployment and factoring visibility, governance, monitoring and
management of all VMs/Apps, cloud environment (e.g., Microsoft Azure or AWS) and traditional
infrastructure (hosted/data centre/on-premises) to be used. Managing cloud services is not the
same as managing on-premises environments. The monitoring parameters, management metrics,
troubleshooting, workloads performance tracking, network management, storage usages, and
dependencies with cloud operators pose unique challenges.
Step 7 – Optimise Environment
Optimisation is the last step in the lifecycle of cloud migration. Once all Applications/VMs have
been migrated and moved to managed services, organisations must closely monitor their
resources to ensure maximum productivity, security, and compliance. Like all great journeys,
having a roadmap is key to arriving at your destination quickly and safely. Following these seven
steps to cloud migration will help you plan every step of the journey and expect the unexpected.
To learn more about the best ways to accelerate your cloud migration efforts and shorten the time
to value for your company and its customers, contact Techwave Australia today for a free
consultation.
Techwave – Experts in Cloud Migration
Over the last few years, Techwave worked with numerous customers and performed several
workload migrations to SaaS / PaaS / IaaS models to mitigate technical debt as part of their
migration projects. We are drawing on our extensive knowledge and know-how and utilising our
Cloud Migration Platform, with distributed architecture and automation-driven DevOps to
accelerate the onboarding of applications to the cloud. Our Cloud Migration Experts were able to
overcome a diverse set of migration challenges quickly and cost-effectively. Below are examples
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of some migration projects, but no two migrations are the same; each migration has unforeseen
challenges that are there Techwave Australia’s uniqueness to solving those problems. A couple of
examples are:
Lots of legacies, expensive to maintain, on-premises applications, and they should not be
Monolithic architectures that are hard to manage, scale when they should not be
Too many companies view application management as an afterthought, and they should not
Too many security breaches and cyberattacks, and that should not be
Too much data without insights and analytics, and that should not be
Poorly designed network architectures when they should not be
Lots of legacies, expensive to maintain, on-premises applications, and they should not be
Monolithic architectures that are hard to manage scale and should not be
Too many companies view application management as an afterthought, and they should not
Too many security breaches and cyberattacks, and that should not be
Too much data without insights and analytics, and that should not be
Poorly designed network architectures and should not be.
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