By Shuba Sridhar
Since 2022, the global economy has indicated signs of a slowdown. In an early 2023 forecast, IMF estimated a decline in global growth from 3.4 percent in 2022 to 2.9 percent in 2023, indicating deceleration in 9 out of 10 advanced economies.
While migrating to the cloud remains a priority for most businesses, burgeoning cloud costs, and migration-related complexities continue to hinder large-scale adoption.
Taking the Right Approach to Cloud Migration
For most organizations, migrating to the cloud is the first step toward digital transformation. However, with cloud spending gradually thinning, both cloud providers and users need to reconsider migration strategies. The focus now is to deliver operational speed and business agility at reduced costs through cloud-managed services.
When it concerns cloud migration, there are three overarching approaches you can choose from:
- Re-host
- Re-platform
- Refactor
Figure: The three main strategies of cloud migration
The lifecycle of an application in the cloud primarily involves five phases – assessment, migration, development, operations, and upgrades. Each phase needs to be implemented for the subsequent phase to be successful.
As indicated above, cloud migration features very early in the pipeline. In our experience, the final choice of migration strategy comes down to the source production environment and desired business outcomes.
Often, businesses prefer to re-host legacy applications that need immediate improvements in speed and efficiency. It’s important to remember that while a lift-and-shift approach is useful for achieving short-term results, it can incur additional costs in the long run if the application is not optimized for the new environment. A comprehensive pre-migration assessment can considerably reduce your cloud ‘meter’ charges and ensure you don’t falter at the beginning of your journey.
A middle approach is re-platforming, where you keep the core architecture intact. Essentially, you tinker with some components of the application to introduce cloud-native features and functionalities before moving it to the new environment. If implemented correctly, re-platforming can give you the time needed to lay the groundwork for a full-scale cloud migration project.
Refactoring is an all-in approach; it uses containerization to fully leverage cloud-native applications. This is a little more complex to achieve for legacy brownfield applications and might take longer to pull off effectively, if done right. However, different applications have different maturity levels and not all of them require the same measure of technological investment.
Figure: The pipeline for refactoring applications
Growing cloud costs and the impending economic slowdown have upped the stakes for cloud investment. Be sure to account for the application’s architectural complexity and performance parameters before committing to any migration strategy.
Cracking the Code to Cloud Success
When it comes to cloud migration, there are basic principles that can guide all verticals and business cases.
Preconceptions Damage Outcomes
Depending on your industry vertical and services, you might have special needs concerning security and compliance, data localization, downtime, latency and tech support. While efficiency and agility remain the top drivers of cloud adoption, keep these considerations in mind when you select different deployment environments like public, private cloud or multi-cloud.
Don’t Rush Your Cloud Journey
Migrating to the cloud should not be the sole focus. Make sure you have a detailed and documented plan in place with a record of the timeline, resources, risks and metrics for success. Stick to the plan, mitigate downtime wherever possible, manage change throughout your organization at every step of the process. Test, test and test for any possible errors or anomalies.
Integration Is Foundational to Cloud Migration
Integration is the glue that holds the entire cloud experience together. The right integration architecture can streamline communication, evolution and maturity of application ecosystems post migration. So far, HIPs (hybrid integration platforms) have emerged as the platform of choice to manage integration components from a single point of control.
APIs Drive Digitalization
Leading from our previous point, APIs play a crucial role in enabling secure access to internal and external applications and services. Using, replicating, and recycling standardized APIs promotes interoperability, speed, scalability, and automation across the entire application architecture.
Governance Is Cloud’s Best Friend
Despite the widely documented benefits associated with cloud, achieving success can be challenging. Migrating to the cloud can expose a lot of security vulnerabilities, both internally and externally. Under such circumstances, a governance program can help secure APIs, manage cross-vendor vulnerabilities, and ensure a robust security program.
Choose Proven Tools to Accelerate Where Possible
A variety of tools exist to improve the speed and efficiency of the cloud migration process. These tools usually include an element of no to low-code automation that helps optimize various processes like API management, application deployment and support.
Conclusion
This era of economic slowdown and growing inflation has placed both cloud users and providers in a unique position. The value provided by the cloud has not declined by any means. Historical failures related to overspending and under-delivery have increased the negotiating power of cloud users. For now, cloud migration needs to be more detailed, deliberate and outcome-oriented to recover lost momentum.
(The author is , Vice President – Strategic Initiatives, Torry Harris Integration Solutions, and the views expressed in this article are her own)
