Application Migration to the Cloud: Strategies, Steps & What Breaks

NetApp Cloud Volumes ONTAP has been successfully used across major cloud platforms, helping businesses streamline their cloud migration process. NetApp Cloud Volumes ONTAP accelerates data transfers to the cloud and helps businesses reduce storage costs by using efficient data management techniques. NetApp Cloud Volumes ONTAP provides advanced data management for businesses migrating data to the cloud. This strategy optimizes the application for the cloud, often by leveraging cloud-native features while keeping most of the existing codebase intact. Refactoring refers to reusing the application code and frameworks while adapting it to run more efficiently on a Platform as a Service (PaaS).

This means they often have robust data security measures, including encryption, multi-factor authentication (MFA), and regular security audits. You only pay for the cloud resources you use, which makes it easier to scale up or down based on business demands. Organizations that shift to the public cloud reduce the costs of maintaining physical data centers, such as hardware procurement, power, and cooling costs.

Here, you make some optimizations to the application to take advantage of cloud capabilities but not as extensively as in refactoring. For example, you may decompose monolithic architectures into microservices or replace existing modules with fully managed cloud services. This provides some benefits of cloud-centered capabilities without extensive initial refactoring. They can optimize server utilization, use more energy-efficient hardware, and employ advanced cooling techniques. Due to their scale, cloud providers can achieve higher energy efficiency levels than traditional data centers. Your users receive content from the geographically closest servers, which reduces latency and increases load times.

Access to advanced technology

Organizations must https://expandsuccess.org/travel-hacks-for-the-modern-professional/ implement strong security practices and understand the compliance requirements of their industry. Ensuring that sensitive data is secure and complies with industry regulations is a major concern during cloud migration. Businesses must carefully manage resources and choose the right cloud services to avoid exceeding budget limits. For businesses migrating to Microsoft Azure, NetApp Cloud Volumes ONTAP offers seamless integration, data protection, and simplified cloud storage management.

Rehosting (Lift and Shift)

Small and simple applications can be migrated within a few weeks, while large enterprise systems may take several months. Cloud migration is the process of moving https://emergingequity.org/2016/02/09/day-of-reckoning-the-collapse-of-the-too-big-to-fail-banks-in-europe-is-here/ applications, data, and workloads from on-premises infrastructure to cloud-based platforms. With a clear roadmap, the right migration approach, and careful execution, you can minimize risks while unlocking the full potential of cloud technologies. Migrating applications to the cloud is more than just a technical upgrade it’s a strategic transformation that can drive scalability, efficiency, and innovation. Choose a migration strategy (lift-and-shift, replatform, or refactor) based on your goals.

The Challenges of Cloud Migration

This can mean moving an on-premises application along with supporting databases and development platforms onto the cloud provider’s servers, storage, and networking infrastructure. Gain actionable insights into application workloads, optimize performance and save costs while ensuring seamless cloud transitions. Discover the process of migrating applications across platforms or environments while ensuring minimal disruption and optimized performance. It’s also essential to conduct follow-up testing after the migration is complete, benchmarking application performance and ensuring that security controls remain in place.

• As with most technology trends, look for cloud migration to grow more sophisticated as cloud providers build even more enticing offerings and continue to simplify the migration processes.
• On top of the servers themselves, you pay for new hardware every few years, for power and cooling, and for the people who maintain the machines.
• Companies migrate to the cloud for different reasons and at different scales—from small testing platforms to large-scale migrations.
• It pays off for apps that are core to the business and will continue to evolve for years.

Before getting started, it’s essential to understand what cloud migration involves. In this guide, you’ll learn a practical, step-by-step cloud migration approach, key strategies, tools, challenges, and best practices to ensure a smooth transition. With various strategies available, such as rehosting, replatforming, or refactoring, organizations can choose the approach that best fits their needs.

Common Challenges in Cloud Migration

After retiring, you can build new cloud-native applications from scratch or purchase new SaaS solutions that better meet your requirements. With a properly planned strategy, rehosting means that users can continue to access their workloads during the migration. Organizations can optimize costs and manage risks by scaling their digital offerings to end users. Besides computing flexibility, cloud migration also helps software development teams deploy workloads closer to end users. Rather than powering their workloads with on-premise servers, organizations use cloud technologies to virtualize the required computing environment. A thorough assessment helps you understand the current state of your chosen cloud platform and create a vision for its future.

Customers see tangible gains when migrating applications to Google Cloud

In each, it’s critical to weigh the costs of all potential options, including choosing to retain some on-premises workloads. In particular, it’s important to compare department-level costs with the total cost to the enterprise, and to assess the total cost of ownership (TCO) of any hardware you’d need to maintain to keep applications on premises. Determining an overall application migration strategy involves considering each individual application’s dependencies and technical requirements, as well as your enterprise’s security, compliance and cost constraints. Because applications are typically built to run on particular operating systems in specific network architectures or developed for a single cloud platform, moving an application to a new environment can pose several challenges. Our powerful tools, including Gemini-powered AI and agentic capabilities, streamline the entire migration process, from assessment and planning to execution and operation.

As cloud services emerged, organizations initially preferred running only new applications in the cloud. Refactoring is best for organizations aiming for long-term scalability and performance, as it fully leverages cloud-native capabilities. These risks can be minimized through detailed planning, proper testing, data backups, and implementing strong security measures during the migration process. Common risks include application of downtime, data loss, security vulnerabilities, and compatibility issues with legacy systems. Proper planning, testing, and phased execution can help reduce delays and ensure a smoother transition.

• The migration process may involve rehosting, replatforming, or refactoring applications to ensure they are optimized for the cloud environment.
• A migration done in a hurry gives you the same apps with the same problems, running on someone else’s servers, plus a few new outages to explain.
• Application migration moves one specific app between environments, and cloud migration is the company-wide program that moves the entire portfolio of apps, infrastructure, and data.
• Java apps are usually the easiest candidates for application migration from on-premises to AWS because Java runs the same way on cloud servers as it does in data centers.

Each phase provides a high-level framework to adapt and customize to your specific requirements. Organizations choose this migration to reduce operational costs, increase scalability, and improve disaster recovery capabilities. The complexity depends on the data center size, security requirements, and how well legacy systems integrate with cloud services. Data center migration involves moving an entire on-premises infrastructure—including servers, storage, networking, and applications—to the cloud. Successful migration depends on factors like code compatibility, performance tuning, and cloud service dependencies.