2011 Trends in Cloud Migration
By Sunil Gupta, SVP & Head of Service Lines, Symphony Services and CloudTweaks contributor
Cloud Migration was one of the key trends of 2010 and it is very likely to accelerate during 2011 and beyond. Many cloud vendors and service providers have come up with interesting solutions to facilitate this task but numerous challenges have to be dealt with and it is very important to take into consideration all implications of such migration to the cloud (being public, private or hybrid).
No matter whether your application is running on-premises or in the cloud, the operations management team needs data that will enable them in effective decision making. The migration of apps or products from on-premise to the cloud brings up additional new issues for ISVs such as service-level agreements, capacity planning, customer billing, auditing, application monitoring, traffic analysis and managing costs (knowing when to scale up or down). These issues are vital for the success of any cloud migration and need to be resolved before the application is deployed to production— and for best results, often before the application is created.
Besides the above issues, a critical success factor of cloud migration is the prudent selection of a migration candidate. The following factors shall be considered while migrating to the Cloud:
- The processes, applications, and data are largely independent
- The points of integration are well defined to achieve optimized apps
- A lower level of security will work just fine as achieving higher level of security may be ambitious
- The Web is the desired platform to access the application
- Cost is a major issue and is one of the objectives of migration
It is also very critical to define a clear migration strategy that involves considering the various migration options available, establishing business priorities, and evolving a strategy that offers a fine balance between costs and meeting business priorities. Moving to IaaS / PaaS / SaaS, the choice is driven by priorities such as elasticity, business model and go-to-market strategy and constrained by factors such as technical feasibility, security, migration costs, etc.
Symphony Services is a leading global specialist providing software product engineering outsourcing services. The company’s focus on Engineering Outcome Certainty™ drives R&D results that shorten time-to-market for new products and delivers greater innovation to compete in a global marketplace.
