BSIT 400 - Cloud Computing and Governance. 

Migration to the Cloud

Technology has transformed and revolutionized our ways of achieving and accomplishing dreams and goals since its existence. The introduction of cloud computing has taken it even further. The purpose for this week three blog topic is center around “Migration to the Cloud.” There are a variety of contents and activities involved with cloud migration, and it’s imperative for one to fully understand all these contents and activities involved for a smooth transition. Some of these contents are but not limited to, Migration Planning, Migration Execution, Deployment Testing and Validation, Cloud Agility, and Planning for Problem. This week three blog is going to focuses on the following contents and activities:

1.      Migration Planning

a.       Cloud Migration Phases – this activity involved completing the most important phases contents which are Planning, migrating, validating, and managing. These migration phases are important and should be completed when decisions are being or has been make before transiting any resources to the cloud – especially in an IT environment where some or the entire organization IT resources like, applications, server, databases, and so on, are being move.

b.       Transition Assessment – it is never a good idea to migrate without any assessment to figure out if it’s a good strategy in the first place for your operation. The purpose for assessment comes down to the fact that not all applications, services or databases will perform perfectly in the cloud. cloud. Legacy software, especially, might not be compatible with the cloud environment. Latency is the delay between the transmission of a signal and its receipt, and this physical reality might make certain cloud-hosted services unreasonably slow. In fact, latency is the most often-cited reason for a company’s return to its own data center after trying a cloud deployment (West, p. 81).

c.       Migration Plan – this activity is by far considered to being the most challenging regarding cloud migration. Nevertheless, it may not be as challenging as you expect if a well-executable plan is implemented for the migration process. There are going to be various plans based on the business operation in the cloud (migrating applications, databases, or network operation). An effective and well thought-of plan can contain aspects like: Baselines, Business Continuity, Existing System, Target Hosts, Cloud Architecture, Legal Restrictions, and Order of Operations.

d.      Migration Strategies – like the saying goes, “not one side fit-all.” The same goes for cloud migration, every organization has its own unique ability approach when migrating to the cloud based on the elements that are being migrated directly to the company intending the transition. The purpose for such intent “can range from wanting to save money to over-hauling their entire IT infrastructure and anything in between” (West, p. 83). Intent of choosing what approaches to pursuit for specific resources, try considering opposite elements “both from a business perspective and from a technical perfective.” For example, one could be, can such an application generate income, or can and will the application subsidize business process?

e.       Timing – this may be seen as the last phase in the migration planning process, but it is just as important as all the others regardless. As you approach the end where all the important aspects and decisions has been made and consider regrading migrating to the cloud and the all the migrating plans are connected, the timing begins for the “workload migration.” Environmental constraints require careful scheduling to minimize the impact of downtime and maximize the available network bandwidth for the migration (West, p. 85). The following are elements that should be considered: Impact of Downtime, Work Hour Restrictions, Time Zones, Peak Time Frames and Costs.

There have been lots of successful and unsuccessful stories told and written about migrating to the clouds by business organizations. The success of migrating to the cloud will heavily rely and depend on the readiness of the business organizations. Planning and researching should be the two up-front approaches implemented and always followed.

 

 

Reference:

West, Jill. (2023). CompTIA Cloud+ Guide to Cloud Computing (p. 81). Kindle Edition. Retrieved: September 20, 2023.