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3 Best Practices To Make Cloud Migration Easier

Cloud migration. It’s a term that comes up in most enterprise conversations at least once. While the term represents the practice of moving from on-premises infrastructure to cloud infrastructure, what is meant by “cloud migration” has evolved. Cloud migration is no longer as simple as moving from on-prem servers to AWS EC2. It could include moving to managed databases or API gateways, or maybe you need AWS for some workloads and Azure for others. Perhaps you’re a financial or public sector organization, and you need a private cloud. Or maybe you need to meet special regulatory requirements.

In this article, we’re going to look at three best practices for making cloud migration easier for your enterprise:

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Cloud Migration Manual: The Adjustment to SaaS Model

The cloud-based SaaS model eliminates the need to build, set up, and manage the system, allowing users to just purchase the desired program for a certain length of time. And to migrate to the cloud you need to set up a roadmap, prepare to change app architecture, pick up a SaaS hosting provider, and lastly delineate the data migration process.

Before the gaining growth of SaaS software popularity within the development, IT solutions were pretty obvious: businesses had on-premises applications, which operated on particular servers with a certain volume and other limitations. And developing ones, companies went along with the high fees on maintenance, expenses on manual labor, as well as challenges regarding updating.

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Cloud Migration Checklist

In several cases where IT executives work towards moving key enterprise applications to the public cloud, their teams struggle or have limited success in their cloud migrations. However, they never give up and they use these lessons to improve their results in subsequent attempts.

If your organization is wanting to modernize mission-critical applications and you’re designing a cloud migration as a locality of this process, you don’t wish to repeat others’ mistakes.

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Application Cloud Migration or Application Modernization?

Traditional software applications and on-premise legacy applications have limited computing power. However, innovations and trials require enormous computing resources. As a result, enterprises are looking at cloud migration and application modernization as the preliminary business requirement for launching innovations. It not only allows them to execute cross geography trials but also test digital innovations with AI/ML algorithms that require exhaustive computing.

Application Cloud Migration and Application Modernization Are Synonymous 

Application cloud migration entails the movement of the on-premise applications to the cloud environment, either on-premise cloud or public cloud, in order to avail the benefits of scalability, flexibility, and exponential computing power. It is synonymous with application modernization that allows the erstwhile on-premise application in its cloud-borne avatar to process queries and data at a tremendous speed. The applications are on the same turf as the cloud-first applications that are the true proponents of the cloud-native environment.

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4 Pitfalls To Be Aware of When Adopting a Hybrid Cloud

Companies making a beeline for cloud services is old news. The Flexera State of the Cloud Report 2021 revealed that the average company’s IT infrastructure setup already runs five different cloud mechanisms on which their data transfer, computing, and networking take place.

This means companies are already exposed to a combination of on-premises servers, public and private clouds. Cloud industry leaders, on being asked how they pulled off their move to the hybrid cloud in a survey by 451 Research, shared some interesting information:

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Beginner’s Guide To Using Amazon S3 Storage Classes

As the world increasingly moves towards the cloud, there’s been an insane demand for the right cloud platforms and solutions over the last few years. Furthermore, with the gradual introduction of advanced technologies and concepts like data science, artificial intelligence, machine learning, and more into organizations’ operational modules, there is a constant need to have adequate storage space to accommodate increasing data generation requirements.

For those of you who are on the lookout for quality and cost-effective AWS cloud migration tools and services, this guide will introduce you to Amazon’s S3 Storage. This post will offer you extensive insights on what it is all about and help you make better decisions on migrating to this service.

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7 Steps To Improve Data Security During Cloud Migration

In 2020, there were over 1,001 reported cases of data breaches in the United States alone. In today’s market, data is now the most important asset for all industries. It’s critical to protect this asset at all costs with comprehensive data security, whether you are migrating to the cloud or maintaining your on-premise servers.

Unfortunately, during the cloud migration process, there are times where data is vulnerable and exposed. Consider this case study of Keepnet Lab’s Data Breach, where the contractor turned off the firewall for ten minutes while migrating to ElasticSearch. This move exposed the database to attackers who breached over 5 billion data records. 

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Solution Thinking Design

Context

You are modernizing a Core System and have defined a Target Business Architecture (BA) that will replace it. You are following the defined modernization roadmap and are in charge of the modernization of one of the Business Capabilities of the Target Business Architecture. Now, you need to understand how the current Core System is addressing the Business Capability, i.e., you have to map which legacy system is providing the business capabilities associated with this system in the BA. 

Usually, the core system will be a set of monoliths, applications, services, and transactions that are integrated and tightly coupled so that if you map all of them and its integrations, you will end up with a picture like this one:

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The Green Lining in Cloud Computing

In current COVID times, the mantra for success includes a healthy mix of innovation with thoughtfulness and corporate social responsibility. As the efforts toward digital transformation are accelerating, so are the pressures to operate as responsible businesses. More and more CXOs are working on striking the right balance between accelerating digital transformation and their sustainability strategy, in addition to adopting a more digitized stand with a “cloud-first” approach.

Sustainability in the Cloud

Companies have historically driven financial, security, and agility benefits through the cloud, but sustainability is becoming imperative. According to the United Nations Global Compact-Accenture Strategy CEO Study on Sustainability, more than 99% of CEOs from large companies now agree that “sustainability issues are important to the future success of their businesses.” Two-thirds of the CEOs view the fourth industrial revolution (4IR) technologies as a critical factor for accelerating socio-economic impact. 59% of CEOs say that they are deploying low-carbon and renewable energy across their operations today. 

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Intro to Google Cloud VMware Engine: Establishing an SDDC in Google Cloud

This post is the first in a series on Google Cloud VMware Engine and Google Cloud Platform. This post walks through planning, prerequisites, and the process of deploying a Software-Defined Data Center (SDDC) using HCX in Google Cloud VMware Engine, as well as configuring a VPN gateway for initial access to the environment.

Before we dive into this, I want to set expectations for this blog series. My goal when working in the cloud is to create, modify and destroy resources programmatically. My tool of choice is Terraform, but I will also use CLI-based tools like gcloud. Occasionally I will inspect API calls directly and perform API calls with Python or cURL. I have found that learning a product's API is an excellent way to master it. Cloud consoles (GUIs) are adequate when getting started, but interfacing with the API, whether through Terraform or an SDK, is how these platforms are designed to work.

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Overcoming Critical Oracle EPM Cloud Migration Challenges With Testing

Due to the low cost of ownership, data security, real-time access to data, scalability, and flexibility, enterprises across the globe are looking to migrate from on-premises Oracle Hyperion to Oracle Fusion Cloud EPM. Undoubtedly, there are numerous benefits of migrating to Oracle EPM Cloud, but there are also some concerns as well. Business users, managers, and IT heads are worried about the initial cost of migration, business disruption, and risks. Furthermore, there is also concern about security, time to transition, ease of adoption, and data conversion.

These concerns are not vague. In fact, they are backed by some potential data.

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Modernizing the Java EE Medrec App

Tutorial: Refactoring the Medrec Application into Microservices

Legacy Java applications are difficult to modernize. Enterprises rely on these monolithic apps to power their businesses but face an urgent mandate to move to the cloud and adopt a cloud native architecture. The following sections track the process of refactoring the Medrec application (also known as the Avitek Medical Records application), a monolithic WebLogic sample Java EE application, into microservices and deploying the new microservices on Oracle Container Engine for Kubernetes (OKE).

This tutorial is also available on the vFunction website.

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How to Leverage Cloud-Native Environments for App Development

The last decade has been all about the rise of cloud-based services, especially when you consider the advancement of streaming services like  Netflix or Spotify. The demand for cloud-based services grew by 18% in 2017, with market revenue of $246.8 billion.

In 2020, a global pandemic pushed many brick-and-mortar businesses to go online. During this digital transformation, one service has been facilitating scalability in the cloud.

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Cloud Analytics Migration: Go With The Need

The Cloud offers access to new analytics capabilities, tools, and ecosystems that can be harnessed quickly to test, pilot, and roll out new offerings. However, despite compelling imperatives, businesses are concerned as they move their analytics to the Cloud. Organizations are looking at service providers who can help them allocate resources and integrate business processes to boost performance, contain cost, and implement compliance across on-premise private and public cloud environments.

The most cited benefit of running analytics in the Cloud is increased agility. With computing resources and new tools available on-demand, analytics applications and infrastructure can be developed, deployed, and scaled up — or down — much more rapidly than can typically be done on-premises.  

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Serverless Architecture Best Practices With AWS Lambda

Serverless applications that are well designed are separated, stateless, and utilize minimal code. With the growth of projects, the only aim of development managers is to preserve the design’s clarity and simplicity along with low code implementation. This blog post recommends the serverless architecture best practices with AWS Lambda.

Arranging Your Code Repositories

Most of the Serverless applications are Monolithic applications in the initial stage. This takes place either due to the growth of complexity with time or because the developers follow the subsisting development practices.

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The Real Costs of Cloud Migration

As cloud computing rapidly proliferates enterprise IT and organizations migrate more of their traditional workloads and on-premise data in the cloud, the cloud will remain one of the fastest-growing segments of IT spend. 

According to Gartner, by 2024, more than 45% of IT spending on system infrastructure, infrastructure software, application software, and business process outsourcing will move from traditional IT infrastructures to the cloud. 

Enterprises are struggling to scale their infrastructure to the insatiable demands. They are adding up costs to hardware procurements, issue software updates, secure infrastructure, train staff, etc. On top of that, the ongoing pandemic is holding available human resources, limiting data center facilities, and shrinking hardware supply chains. Cloud computing brings much-needed relief.

No doubt, Flexera State of the Cloud report indicates 61 percent of organizations plan to focus on cloud migration this year. However, against what marketing pages of AWS and Microsoft Azure make you believe, cloud migration is more than moving VMs and databases in the cloud. You have to understand app dependencies, access technical feasibility, select the best instances, just to name a few. And then there are post migrations woes.

These challenges translate to added cost and not all of them are conspicuous until very later. To estimate the real cost of cloud migration for your business, you need to take a thoughtful, disciplined approach. The first step is to evaluate your current infrastructure.

The Real Cost of Current Infrastructure

If you don’t know how much your organization is paying for all those servers, software licenses, maintenance contracts, extended warranties, networking equipment, security contracts, then a visit to the accounting department will ease your day. 
Also, you can gather data on network bandwidth, storage, and database capacity, etc. In a typical SME setup with a five-year hardware upgrade cycle, the first-year cost can be $40000-$50000 considering these variables:

Considered variables

In addition to the first year's costs, there are recurring costs. You may not buy new servers every year but must maintain them. The same goes for all the pieces of hardware and software running your IT infrastructure and resources managing it. Your recurring cost should be anywhere between 10-20% of your first-year cost.
Recurring cost analysis
However, the real cost of your current IT implementation is more than direct, operating, and administrative costs. Did you know you lose money every time there is downtime? When a power system in British Airway’s data center failed, the airline lost roughly $68 million in fare refund alone, not to mention a 2.8% dip in their stock prices. If your on-premise setup has a 98% uptime, then you’re giving up 14 hours of productivity hours every month. Most cloud vendors guarantee a 99.9% availability and compensate for any additional downtime based on your contract. According to a Forbes report, for an hour of downtime, you could be losing thousands of dollars. However, for most SMBs, you could be losing anywhere from $3000 to $5000 per month in downtimes. 

So the cost of total ownership of your on-premise setup for three years is approx. $75000 to $85000.

The Real Cloud Infrastructure Cost

So the long story short: once upon a time, it was next to impossible to estimate cloud infrastructure cost up until the actual migration. There was little competition and cloud computing was all about AWS and little of Google Cloud and Microsoft Azure here and there. Now we have every major tech firm in the cloud business and the competition is at an all-time high. 

The pricing of major cloud vendors is still a little too complicated, but they now provide an approachable price estimation tool. Every major cloud vendor, along with AWS, offers some form of Total Cost of Ownership (TCO) Calculator, including Google Cloud and Microsoft Azure. 

Mostly, it is a simple tool that asks you a few basic hardware questions like your required bandwidth, RAM, processor core, storage, etc. If the tool feels a little arbitrary, then there is an advanced tool too that asks enough questions to cover your entire infrastructure, but the estimations are more accurate. 

So I ran estimations on TCO tool for AWS, GCE and Azure respectively for a typical SME setup consisting 32 vCPUs and 128 GB RAM.

Cloud Services comparison