What is Cloud Migration?

What Is Cloud Migration?

Cloud migration is the process of transferring digital business operations and services to a cloud instance. More specifically, it’s taking business and end-user applications, data, and other IT processes and moving it from an on-prem deployment into a cloud environment via a cloud-first data center. IT organizations migrate mission-critical workloads to the cloud to improve end-user experience, optimize costs, and create a more flexible and agile business. Cloud migration can also be used to describe the process of moving from one cloud provider to another.

While cloud migration is no simple task, the potential benefits and cost savings of the transformation can be invaluable to the business and its overarching digital operations.

Benefits of Cloud Migration

Improved Cost Savings

Organizations that move to the cloud typically see a large decrease in the amount of spend allocated towards IT Operations and on-going maintenance. Because many cloud providers offer features like rolling upgrades and other maintenance-related services, this gives back time to ITOps professionals to work on other more mission-critical objectives or other innovative tasks.

Higher Scalability

Moving to the cloud means the size of application and service deployments can be increased immensely without having to worry about load balancing, cost acceleration, or bandwidth. This can enable faster deployment cycles, increase workload size, and a greater customer experience, without the worry of purchasing additional physical services or other networking hardware.

Increased Flexibility

When digital operations are conducted in the cloud, teams have the ability to access data from anywhere and use the tools and services they love to use without having to be at a specific physical location or limited to a subset of tools. Businesses that operate in the cloud have the ability to centralize operations no matter the location, which makes the challenge of opening new offices internationally or letting employees work remotely much easier to achieve.

Accelerated Performance

When businesses leverage cloud services instead of on-prem services, it’s much easier to deliver a consistent customer experience with the highest quality services, largely due to the reality that the data is accessible from anywhere. In terms of IT and software development, teams can combine automation with existing processes and use cloud tools to continuously deploy new products, features, or updates with the push of a button. This helps keep continuity across business units and keeps customers satisfied with the product and/or experience.

Cloud Migration Deployment Process

While cloud migration is a single term, businesses take on its own process when engaging in the migration process themselves. This means some companies may be moving away from an on-prem environment and into a cloud environment, while others may be moving away from an existing hybrid-cloud environment—or just switching cloud providers all together. Every company is different, meaning the operational maturity of each organization varies depending on which part of the journey they are on.

Challenges of Cloud Migration

But with this journey comes increased complexity and the reality of managing a hybrid environment as the migration takes place. Some of the challenges of cloud migration may include:

• People. Managing hybrid-infrastructure increases complexity and changes workflows for Operations.
• Technology. Concurrently managing on-prem and cloud infrastructure multiplies the complexity of monitoring, supporting, and securing the business.
• Processes. A shift to hybrid-cloud or multi-cloud means an exponential increase in infrastructure-related incidents. That, combined with an increasingly distributed team, increases operational complexity

Cloud migration doesn’t just happen overnight—it takes a village. Ensuring your people, technology, and processes are all running parallel with the transformation is the biggest key to the migration’s success. Missing any of these three keys would be detrimental to the transformation and only slow down your path to success.

To learn more about cloud migration and how PagerDuty can help you in your journey, visit our cloud migration resource page and try a 14-day free trial today.