Cloud Migration Strategy | 6Rs | Cloud Computing

Cloud Migration Strategies (6R's)

In today’s world every organization wants to harness the potential of cloud computing in order to gain competitive advantages over their peers and competitors.

Migrating their existing applications and infrastructure from on-premises environment to cloud environment would be a daunting and problematic task, if a though through well-designed plan is not created for cloud migration activities.

To create a well-designed plan, you need to first understand the prescribed cloud migration strategies.

In 2011 Gartner analyst Richard Watson outlined 5 R’s Strategies for Cloud migration.

v  Rehost

v  Refactor

v  Revise

v  Rebuild

v  Replace

In 2016 Steven Orban of AWS renamed some and added a new one. That makes them 6 R’s. These 6 R’s helps you categorizing the cloud migration strategy of your applications and bringing structure into your decision processes.

Before jumping into what are 6 R’s it is necessary to understanding the followings:

1.       Organization Objective

§  Long Term strategy for Cloud

§  Availability of Cloud skilled resources

2.       Application Portfolio Discovery

§  Business requirements

§  Existing Licensing Agreements

§  What is in your environment,

§  Technical Stack

§  Application Interdependencies

§  Storage Level

§  Network Level

§  Performance Matrix

Below are the list of some Application Performance Monitor and Management Tools, which will help you to discover the application portfolio exist in your organization.

6 R’s Migration Strategies.

 

v  Harnessing advanced cloud capabilities. v  Testing the water v  Architecture of the application is not supported in cloud (monolithic code) v  Lifting your stack and shifting it from on-premises hosting to the cloud	Rehost (Lift & Shift)
v  A variation on the lift and shift. v  Making a few further adjustments into your application to optimize for the cloud. v  Core architecture of applications stays the same	Re-platform
v  moving your applications to a new, cloud-native product, most commonly a SaaS platform. v  Move from perpetual licenses to a software-as-a-service model v  Example: Migrate your customer relationship management (CRM) system to Salesforce.com	Repurchase
v  Want to fully utilize the power of Cloud. v  Re-architecting is needed for application. v  New Application in planning for development	Refactor
v  Compliance Sensitive (need to store data on-premises only) v  Application requires major refactoring. v  External / internal dependencies of application not accessible from Cloud environment. v  Application is architecturally not fit for Cloud v  No Business justification to migrate	Retain
v  Application no longer useful or reaching end of life	Retire