Extend visibility from on-premises to the cloud

Cloud migration is the process of migrating IT workloads to a cloud provider to provision more resilient IT services faster and with greater scale and efficiency. This can include migrating away from a data center to a cloud, migrating from one cloud to another or transitioning to a hybrid or multicloud environment. Cloud migrations are a common part of application modernization, IT modernization and digital transformation initiatives.

There can be many benefits to a cloud migration including reducing costs, improving staff agility and productivity, improving security and resilience and making it easier to scale service delivery for larger audiences. Migrating to a cloud, rather than maintaining a data center, can significantly reduce capital expenditures in favor of operating expenses and shift many critical tasks to third parties that specialize in particular types of software and infrastructure.

There are many common challenges for cloud migrations. These include a lack of holistic strategy for end-to-end visibility, poor understanding of the impact and behavior of hybrid cloud infrastructure on services, concerns of runaway costs and loss of controls in the new cloud platform, data security and compliance issues and unanticipated vendor lock-in.

There are five common cloud migration patterns of increasing complexity, often referred to as the “5 Rs”:

• Rehost: Also known as “lift and shift,” rehosting is when data or applications are simply redeployed on a cloud server while making the fewest changes necessary to the underlying code.
• Refactor: This occurs when an application is optimized and adjusted to make better use of the cloud environment, which is not fundamentally necessary for the migration. Core architecture remains unchanged during a refactoring and changes are minimal.
• Revise: Revising is similar to refectoring, but involves more significant changes to the underlying architecture to make better use of cloud services. This approach requires greater planning and understanding of the organization’s IT road map.
• Rebuild: Rebuilding involves discarding the existing source code and replacing it with new code, custom developed for the cloud environment. Rebuilding is often the best choice for the long term in cases where an application will continue to be maintained internally.
• Replace: Replacing is when an organization stops relying on its own custom-built applications and instead migrates to using a prebuilt third-party application provided by a vendor and hosted on a cloud. In these cases, data is probably the only thing that is migrated, and the legacy software and infrastructure is abandoned.