With the growing popularity of cloud systems among enterprises, many businesses are currently adopting cloud-based systems. Cloud investments have become an integral part of IT optimization. With digital transformation, more and more applications and infrastructure are experiencing a shift towards the cloud.
In order to gain a competitive advantage and experience long-term success, enterprises need to follow the approach of cloud migration. It is a process of moving applications, data, and other elements of a business to a cloud computing environment.
Types of cloud migration :
- Transfer of data from the local data center to a public cloud
- Cloud-to-cloud migration
- And reverse cloud migration
How Cloud Migration Is Beneficial For Businesses?
The major advantage of cloud migration is hosting applications and data most effectively based on various factors such as security, cost, and performance.
Therefore, many companies are currently taking advantage of this process by migrating on-premises applications and data from their local data center to public cloud infrastructure, which provides self-service provisioning, greater elasticity, redundancy, and flexible pay-per-use model.
Relation Between AI And Cloud Computing
As businesses tend to deal with more and more data, they rely on technologies to improve their operational efficiency. AI and cloud are currently one of the most integrated technologies in business processes, and the combination of both helps maximize the productivity of a business.
The relation between Artificial Intelligence and Cloud can bring transformation in businesses by revolutionizing various processes by creating Smart Cloud linked with Machine Learning resources.
An AI-powered cloud environment when integrated within an enterprise will collect the data, learns from it, makes predictions, and solves potential problems before the user even notices them. This enables an effective merging of both the technologies and allows businesses to make data-driven decisions by providing crucial insights.
Steps To Successfully Migrate Applications To The Cloud
Migrating data to a cloud-based environment can help businesses improve their operational performance, work scalability, agility, and security.
The following are a few steps involved in a successful cloud migration process:
- Develop A Cloud Strategy
The first step involved in starting a cloud-based journey for your business includes having a clear set of objectives. This is crucial because it provides an understanding of what you want to achieve.
It is essential to establish KPIs for your migration processes such as page load speeds, response times, availability, memory usage, and conversion rates, making it easier for businesses to have a baseline understanding of where you stand.
These indicators will allow measurement across various areas. Based on these KPIs, a business can develop a cloud strategy in a way that prioritizes business objectives over technology.
- Identify And Choose The Right Applications
Mot all applications of a business are cloud friendly. While some perform better on hybrid or private clouds compared to public clouds, others may need minor changes or in-depth code changes. Therefore, the next step in migrating your application to the cloud involves evaluating all your applications to be moved to the cloud.
Businesses need to consider various factors and evaluate which applications need redesigning, check if the cloud provider allows for migration without reconfiguration, and how long it will take to achieve ROI on each application. This analysis helps determine what makes sense to migrate.
- Choose The Right Cloud Provider
The next step involves choosing the suitable cloud provider that will guide your business in the right way in the cloud migration process. However, it is essential to consider factors such as the tools provided, if the cloud service can support public, private, and multi-cloud environments, and check if the technology is up-to-date before selecting the cloud provider.
It is vital to choose a provider with proven experience in order to manage complex processes involved in the migration process more efficiently.
- Maintain Data Integrity
Risk management is crucial because sensitive data can be exposed during a cloud move. Validation of business processes after the transfer is essential to guarantee that automated controls produce the same results without affecting normal operations.
- Execute The Migration Process
The last step involves the migration process. This step will be relatively easy when the previous steps are correctly implemented. The complexity and design of your applications and your data architecture will influence how you migrate to the cloud.
Businesses can migrate their entire program to the cloud, test it, and then switch their on-premises traffic over. Alternatively, a piecemeal approach can also be used to gradually transfer consumers to the cloud, validating them and repeating the process until all customers have been moved to the cloud.
Conclusion
Adopting cloud strategy in a business requires substantial changes within various operational processes. AI and automation give us the tools we need to make the cloud migration process feasible and easier to navigate. In addition, AI saves a lot of time and money for businesses by automating performance monitoring, root-cause investigation, remediation, system settings, stress testing, and many other tasks.
Therefore, technologies such as AI and Cloud-based applications must be widely integrated across businesses to evolve and remain profitable in the current competitive business world.
