In today’s rapidly evolving business landscape, organizations must stay dynamic and agile to maintain a competitive edge. This is particularly true for IT companies that strive to apply innovative processes and ensure continuous growth.
As a result, an increasing number of businesses across industries are migrating to the cloud—a process known as cloud migration. This transformative move plays a pivotal role in achieving the final stage of their digital transformation journey. The COVID-19 pandemic has accelerated this process, compelling companies to adopt a more holistic end-to-end approach.
With outdated and inefficient infrastructures becoming burdensome, businesses are turning to the cloud to experience its multitude of benefits.
The cloud lies at the heart of this digital transformation, and the companies that swiftly embrace this change and choose the right migration partner will emerge as winners in the competitive market. In this article, we will delve deeper into the realm of cloud migration, exploring its benefits, key considerations in selecting a cloud provider, and how Hoverture can maximize your migration to Google Cloud.
CLOUD MIGRATION: WHAT IS IT AND WHAT IS ITS PURPOSE?
Cloud migration involves the process of transferring data, applications, and other essential business elements to a cloud computing environment. This environment offers the advantages of on-demand availability of computer system resources, including data storage and computing power, without requiring direct active management from the user. By migrating to the cloud, companies can bid farewell to outdated and inefficient infrastructures such as aging servers and unreliable firewall appliances. They can also abandon hardware or software solutions that no longer operate at optimum capacity. The cloud migration journey encompasses careful analysis, planning, and execution to ensure compatibility with business requirements. Gartner has identified five cloud migration strategies, known as the “5 Rs,” allowing organizations to choose the approach that best suits their needs: rehost, refactor, revise, rebuild, and replace.
Rehost
Rehosting, or “lift and shift” involves using infrastructure-as-a-service (IaaS).
The company simply redeploys its existing data and applications on the cloud server. So it’s easy to do and suited for organizations less familiar with cloud environments. It also represents a good option for organizations where it is difficult to modify the code, and it is necessary to migrate the applications intact.
Refactor
Refactoring, or “lift, tinker, and shift” is when a business optimizes its applications for the cloud, employing a platform-as-a-service (PaaS) model.
In this strategy, the core architecture of the applications remain unchanged, but adjustments are required to be made to better use the cloud-based tools.
Revise
Revising builds upon the previous strategies, requiring more significant changes to the architecture and code of the systems being moved to the cloud. This is because it’s necessary to enable applications to take full advantage of the services available in the cloud and this process may require major code changes.
Rebuild
Rebuilding takes the Revise approach to the next level, since it consists in discarding the existing code base and replacing it with a new one. This process takes a lot of time and is advisable only when companies think that their existing solutions don’t meet current business needs.
Replace
Replacing is similar to the Rebuild approach, but in this case the company doesn’t redevelop its own native application from scratch. This strategy involves migrating to a third-party, prebuilt application provided by a vendor, so the only thing the business will migrate from its existing application is the data, while everything else about the system is new.
WHY MOVING OPERATIONS TO CLOUD: KEY BENEFITS
The decision to migrate operations to the cloud stems from a variety of compelling benefits. These benefits revolve around hosting applications and data in the most effective IT environment, considering factors such as cost, performance, and security. Let’s explore the key benefits of cloud migration in more detail:
- Faster Deployment: In today’s fast-paced business cycles, cloud migration enables companies to keep up. It facilitates swift provisioning and deployment of infrastructure, applications, data, and other services. With cloud migration, businesses can provision servers within hours, eliminating the need for purchasing and setting up physical hardware. This streamlined process leads to faster, cost-effective, and simpler deployment. Moreover, the cloud facilitates testing and deployment of new applications while ensuring uninterrupted production.
- Cost Savings and Optimization: Cloud services are available at a nominal cost, resulting in significant savings in capital expenditures (Capex). Additionally, cloud migration enables auto-scaling of digital assets, services, and applications, allowing companies to benefit from a pay-per-use model. This flexible pricing structure optimizes cost efficiency, ensuring businesses only pay for the resources they require.
- Increased Data Security: The cloud offers enhanced security compared to traditional IT environments. By utilizing the right frameworks and robust security protocols, cloud service providers can provide advanced security measures. This heightened security is a key factor driving companies to migrate operations to the cloud, making it a top priority for any cloud service provider aiming to attract users.
- Agility and Flexibility: Cloud migration simplifies IT infrastructure, enhancing agility and flexibility. The cloud enables easy accessibility, reducing the need for physical staff presence from operations to maintenance. Virtual machines in the cloud are highly flexible, allowing businesses to scale up or down as needed and seamlessly switch to multiple redundancies in real-time. This elasticity ensures companies can quickly adapt to changing business demands.
- Improved Scalability: Scalability is a critical factor for companies experiencing growth or fluctuations in demand. The cloud offers near-infinite scalability, allowing businesses to quickly adjust resources based on workload requirements. This ensures optimal performance during peak periods and cost savings during slower periods. Cloud migration eliminates the need to invest in new infrastructure, enabling companies to scale their operations effortlessly.
Well, knowing about the benefits of cloud migration you probably understand that choosing the right provider to start this process is crucial.
This is because the right provider can actually optimize and maximize the benefits of cloud migrations.
But how to choose it well? We are here to guide you in doing it at best, keep reading!
GOOGLE CLOUD IS THE TOP THREE CLOUD PROVIDER IN THE WORLD
Choosing the right cloud provider is crucial for a successful migration.
Organizations should consider factors such as a full-service provider offering end-to-end services, geographical fit, customer service expertise, and responsibility and security measures. Among the top cloud providers, Google Cloud stands out for its global presence, advanced security protocols, comprehensive services, and data-driven solutions.
Despite being smaller when compared with other providers, Google Cloud is one of the best providers on the market because it is already familiar to billions of users on the globe and so perceived as trustworthy.
Apart from that, its services include AI, Automation, Analytics and IT modernization solutions, that are the ones to leverage to embrace digital transformation.
With Google Cloud, the cloud transformation involves the entire company, allowing every business unit and every employee to participate in the process.
This is possible because of the democratization of data, the modernization of apps, the connections between users and thanks to safer transactions.Moreover, Google Cloud provides a highly scalable and secure network that protects your data from threats and fraud.
So, choosing Google Cloud as provider for your migration means:
- Adopting a provider that delivers infrastructure on a global scale and focuses on expanding into new regions and countries to produce more edge locations for the network. This results in lower latency and higher performance;
- Benefit from a security model ( the same one used by Google to protect its flagship products) developed over 15 years of continuous improvement through innovation;
- Implementing a data-driven transformation with Google’s data cloud capable of delivering high levels of speed, scalability and security, all with integrated AI. As well as turning data into real-time decisions and reaching all users in your organization;
- Transforming team collaboration by integrating video, email, chat and document collaboration in a single location with Google Workspace.
These are just some of the many benefits of choosing Google Cloud and Hoverture can actually help your business to leverage them and maximize your migration process.
HOW HOVERTURE CAN MAXIMIZE YOUR MIGRATION TO GOOGLE CLOUD
As a trusted partner of Google Cloud, Hoverture provides comprehensive support and tools to maximize the benefits of cloud migration.
Our expertise spans various areas, including cloud strategy, infrastructure modernization, database modernization and data warehousing, and application modernization and cloud-native development.
With Hoverture’s guidance, you can navigate the complexities of cloud migration and achieve optimal outcomes.
Choose the right partner and start enjoying all the benefits of Cloud Migration now!
