These years the global cloud market has been growing steadily, and since more and more companies started working remotely, at the end of 2020, it showed explosive growth.
When choosing popular online resources, the load on the company’s IT infrastructure is also growing. But sometimes the company just doesn’t have enough resources.
The other way is migration to the cloud. Using cloud hostings allows companies to optimize the IT infrastructure, and to deal with overloads successfully.
How does cloud migration work, what options are there, and what are the main steps of migrating?
Understanding Cloud Migration
Migration to the cloud is the process of moving IT infrastructure and all software from on-premise to cloud environments.
Corporations such as Amazon, Microsoft and Google have already given up storing data on their own servers. In the coming years, small and medium-sized businesses are also starting to actively use Cloud hostings.
Cloud migration features
Cloud migration encourages your business to grow because:
- It allows your company to scale fast;
- It saves your company from interruption of business processes and workflows
- It helps your company meet your customers’ expectations and stay on top.
So, more and more customers are coming to us to migrate Jira Server, Jira DataCenter (Jira on-premise) into Jira Cloud. Why is it so popular? Because moving Jira, Confluence, and other software on cloud brings a lot of benefits:
- Instant software and application upgrades;
- Improved speed and accessibility;
- Better data security;
- More options for third-party integrations
Besides, cloud services allow you to reduce costs and time, provide faster scaling, and deliver a better customer experience.
Migration options
Full Migration
This is seamless migration of all your infrastructure to the cloud: all data, settings, applications used, and more. Usually such migration is good for small and medium-sized businesses with a fairly simple IT infrastructure. Data transfer and configuration take a couple of days. This approach has minimal risks, and requires minimum resources for implementation, but does not always use the capabilities of the cloud service to 100%.
Hybrid Migration
Some of the IT infrastructure components are left on the physical servers, and the part of information resources is being migrated to the cloud. You can choose this migration option for testing your cloud infrastructure. If you like the results, it’s possible to do the full migration step by step. This option is good for larger businesses with few remote teams.
Main steps
Project migration is challenging, that’s why it is worth planning well beforehand. When we provide Cloud Migration service, we stick to the following plan:
- Assess and Plan
The first step is to evaluate all components of your IT infrastructure and set the right priorities. By this, you’ll get a real picture of the architecture. At Polontech, we handle these tasks on the 30-minutes call with customers:
- We discuss the advantages of server and cloud for a particular organization;
- Learn about the current state of the infrastructure components;
- Help to choose licensing.
- Choose best Cloud environment
If choosing a public cloud, you can use everything provided by the public cloud hosting (like Amazon). This is a good choice for companies that need more flexibility and constant support.
Private cloud means the creation of your own cloud infrastructure, and this brings more benefits to big corporations which have a vast IT infrastructure. Having a private cloud, you save money on buying, configuring, administering a physical server, and hiring staff to maintain it and get a dedicated IT team in Polontech who monitor the hosting environment 24/7.
For a Cloud Migration service, we also help our clients choose between Atlassian Cloud, AWS, Azure, Yandex, and Google Cloud platforms for your public or private cloud.
- Migration
After everything is planned thoroughly, we back up all data and launch test migration. If everything is OK, we start migrating your data, services and applications from physical servers to the cloud environment. After everything is done, we test new infrastructure and fix possible bugs.
Every Cloud Migration process is individual and depends on different criteria, that’s why the time needed for migration also depends.
Conclusion
Cloud Migration helps companies adapt to any changes and scale. The process of cloud migration could be challenging, but it’s individual for every company. Besides flexibility, it also supports teams working remotely.
