The 6 R’s of Cloud Migration
Organisations are moving their applications to the cloud for greater productivity and cost-efficiency. When data and applications are moved to the cloud, it allows greater collaboration and lightens the budget. It also has added benefits of disaster risk management and ensures business continuity because the servers, data, and platforms are not tied down to an on-premise structure, something that was essential during the pandemic.
While the cloud migration process can be daunting, companies need to take a well-organised and holistic approach to the process. The process should begin by understanding which applications and services they wish to move and preparing for how the migration will affect licensing, services or products across the organisation. Planning and executing a cloud migration process involves several steps and options, collectively known as the “6 R's of Migration”.
The 6 R’s of migration involve - retiring, retaining, rehosting, re-platforming, refactoring, and re-architecting.
Retire
Retiring is effectively a cleansing process, you need to identify all the users of each migration element and identify what's being used and what is not. Identifying everything that has the potential to migrate in the business will allow you to evaluate the value of a product, service, or application.
If you’re able to identify what to retire, you will save money on items that previously should have been phased out.
Retain
Retaining some IT aspects on-premise is a popular choice for a hybrid cloud platform. Some elements of your tech environment may not migrate and thus will be retained as-is. There may be many reasons for businesses to maintain an in-house on-premise system- such as riding out the depreciation value or perhaps the cost of migration may be too high.
Rehost
Rehosting is a very popular migration strategy and is popularly known as “lift and shift”. It involves little effort and is a quick solution for migrating applications, software and data to the cloud. Rehosting is especially popular for initial migration because it involves moving existing physical and virtual servers into an IaaS solution. Rehosting may allow companies to re-architecture in the future, once a cloud-based operation is in place.
Replatform
Replatforming though costly is a good option for companies with rigid legacy IT systems that cannot be restructured completely at the time of cloud migration. Well-established organisations and businesses sometimes have a legacy system that is far too structured to just move to a IaaS cloud platform. Instead of changing the core of the applications, the applications can be emulated through a virtual machine so that legacy systems can become compatible with modern-day cloud technologies.
Repurchase
When possible, repurchasing is an excellent and fast way to access cloud-based SaaS that is tailored to your business needs. SaaS will take your business’s existing applications and change them into a cloud-based product to help manage operations such as HR, CRM or CMS.
Refactor and Re-architect
Refactoring and re-architecturing of applications usually take place when there is a need for adding new features or ensuring scalability. It boosts agility, overall productivity, business continuity, and collaboration. This strategy tends to be more expensive but is usually executed after an initial migration via one of the other approaches, like rehosting.
Cloud-based migration is an excellent solution for businesses looking to cloud technologies to achieve their goals, but companies must begin by understanding the options and determining the best course of action. Savant is informed by robust market research and anticipates the growth in the cloud technology sector; we are prepared to meet our client’s potential talent needs in their transformation journeys through our extensive network of cloud professionals. To know more about how we can support you, reach out to us at - technology@savantrecruitment.com for a free consultation!
