With almost every organization today undergoing digital transformation, cloud adoption is at an all-time high. According to Gartner, global cloud revenue will total $474 billion in 2022, with more than 85% of organizations embracing a cloud-first principle by 2025. Of all the clouds available in the market, AWS is quickly becoming a global favorite for those looking to capitalize on advanced storage, compute resources and enjoy increased flexibility, scalability, and reliability. But moving to AWS requires careful precision and planning. There are several challenges that can come in the way of IT directors crafting the perfect AWS cloud migration strategy. Read on to uncover the top 5 challenges that you need to be aware of while curating your AWS Cloud Migration Strategy.
Evaluating Your Current Tech Environment
The first step towards successful migration begins with evaluating your current on-premises, cloud, or hybrid environment. A detailed portfolio discovery can help determine what’s in your environment, understand dependencies, as well as help you understand which data or assets will be easy to manage and which would need focused attention.
Since the complexity of migrating existing applications varies on several different factors such as age, existing architecture complexity, customizations, licensing agreements, integrations, and more, a thorough assessment will help outline a robust migration roadmap, finalize an approach, and have the right risk mitigation strategies in place for quick and efficient turnaround.
The Top Issues You May Run into on Your AWS Migration Journey
Once you have all your challenges, requirements, and opportunities documented, you can then go on to migrate your data and applications in a phased manner. But whether you decide to rehost, re-platform, refactor, or rearchitect your applications as part of your AWS migration journey, there are chances that you will run into some problems. Let’s look at top issues that can impact the success of your AWS cloud migration strategy:
1. Effectively Managing Costs
The cloud offers an array of capabilities for organizations to leverage on an on-demand basis. But such easy provisioning also tends to increase overall costs. Effectively managing costs requires you to make the most of several cost optimization capabilities to curtail monthly bills and avoid overspend. For instance, you can opt for rightsizing your instances when utilization is low or use reserved instances to lower total cost of ownership. At the same time, you can also rely on tools like the AWS Cost Explorer to visualize, manage, and optimize your cloud costs or use the Operations Conductor to automatically resize EC2 instances while also reducing operational complexity.
2. Efficiently Moving Your Data
Data lies at the foundation of any AWS Cloud Migration Strategy; but moving data is not just about a simple lift-and-shift. You need to understand what data you are moving, why you are moving it, and what cleansing and processing is needed to improve its quality, availability, and scalability. AWS offers a wide variety of services and tools to help you migrate your data sets: from files and databases to images and tape backups. You can choose from tools like AWS Storage Gateway to seamlessly connect and extend your on-premises applications on AWS cloud, AWS Direct Connect to accelerate network transfers, and AWS DataSync to automate the migration of data between your on-premises data center and AWS cloud.
3. Enabling Robust Security Processes
Although the cloud opens doors to several opportunities, it also requires organizations to develop and implement robust security policies and processes to gain control and confidence. While AWS offers a range of security services aimed at protecting your information, identities, applications, and devices, if you want to further meet security and compliance requirements, you can choose from a range of security, identity, and compliance capabilities. For instance, for identity and access management, you can use AWS Identity Services to manage resources and permissions at scale. On the other hand, if you want to safeguard your networks, you can embrace Network and Application Protection Services to enforce security measures at every endpoint across your organization.
4. Monitoring Data and Applications
Once you migrate to AWS, you’ll find yourself in a highly dynamic environment which is constantly changing. Relying on old-fashioned strategies and siloed approaches for tracking data or monitoring applications might no longer be relevant. Instead, embracing Amazon CloudWatch can help in advanced monitoring of applications, providing you with actionable insights to quickly respond to performance changes and optimize resource utilization. Since the service continuously collects monitoring and operational data in the form of logs, metrics, and events, you can get a real-time and centralized view of your AWS instances as well as complete visibility into their health and well-being, so you can take necessary action to keep them running smoothly.
5. Enabling Resiliency
One of the top reasons why organizations move to the cloud is because of the resiliency it offers. But how can you enable this resiliency on AWS? How do you ensure that the applications you move to AWS are available and highly resilient? One way to do this is to leverage the AWS Resilience Hub; using well-architected best practices, the hub can allow you to prepare and protect your applications from disruptions, thus improving the resiliency of your workloads. Another way is to opt for AWS Regions that provide multiple, physically separated Availability Zones connected through low-latency, high-throughput, and highly redundant networking. You can use these zones to enable automatic failover between zones – without interruption.
Ensuring Painless AWS Cloud Migration
If you want to ensure successful, painless, and cost-effective AWS cloud migration, parenting with a cloud expert is a great way to strategize, build, and deploy complex AWS environments. Offering deep technical and strategic expertise, a partner can help identify the right workloads to migrate and constantly provide recommendations on reducing costs and improving service delivery. Partner with an expert today and leverage a range of modern and flexible AWS Cloud Migration Services to accelerate your transition to the cloud – and not worry about migration challenges or administrative overheads.
