Is your organization seeking to migrate its applications to the cloud? Whenever the CIO issues such a directive, most architects grapple with bewildering choices regarding how to go about the whole thing.

When making the migrating decision, experts must consider these three important things:

• Architecture principles
• Evaluation criteria
• Organization’s requirements

However, of great importance to note is the fact that there’s no alternative that offers a perfect solution. All strategies need architects to clearly understand the Migration process from various perspectives as well as criteria such as application architecture, value of existing investments, IT staff skills etc.

Companies have been taking advantage of advancements in technology to migrate their systems to more efficient and capable platforms in the recent past. Over time, it’s important to note that the fundamentals around the migration process haven’t changed. As indicated earlier, all one needs to do is to assess the gaps in the present system, understand the advantages of the new system, plan, and finally migrate. Nevertheless, is you’re planning to migrate a vast number of legacy apps into the cloud, there’s certainly more to be done.

How to Formulate a Migration Strategy

Typically, enterprises start to contemplate how to shift an app during a Migration Process, second phase – Portfolio Discovery and Planning. This is once they’ve established what is in their environment, what is easy when it comes to migrating, what are the inter-dependencies, what is going to be challenging to migrate, and how they will migrate every application.

By utilizing this knowledge, companies can outline a plan or come up with strategies on how to handle the migration process of their application in their portfolio and in which order.

The sophistication of migrating the current applications certainly varies. It all depends on the existing licensing arrangement and architecture. If you think about the universe of apps to migrate on a range of sophistication, then it’s prudent to use a virtualized and service-oriented architecture that’s based on a spectrum’s low complexity as well as a monolithic mainframe on the spectrum’s high complexity end.

Experts such as Amazon Consulting Services suggest that you start with something on a spectrum’s low-complexity end for the reason that it’ll be effortless to complex which will surely give you similar immediate positive reinforcement or the ‘quick wins’ as you learn your way up.

So which are some of the things to look for your cloud migration strategy? The following are the 6 app migration strategies you need to consider:

• Rehosting
• Replatforming
• Repurchasing
• Refactoring/Re-architecture
• Retire
• Refactoring

1. Re-host

Most early cloud projects gravitate towards new development utilizing cloud-native capabilities. Nonetheless, in a huge legacy migration scenario where a firm seeks to improve its migration faster to meets its needs, most of the applications are rehosted. For instance, GE Oil & Gas discovered that even if a company doesn’t implement any cloud optimizations, it can still save 30% of costs through rehosting. Organizations can automate most rehosting with tools such as AWS VM Import/Export, Racemi even though some clients prefer to do it manually.

2. Replatform

With replatforming, you make several cloud optimizations to get some tangible benefits. You don’t change the main architecture of an application. By shifting to a database-as-a-service platform such as Amazon RDS (Amazon Recreational Database Service) or a fully managed platform such as Amazon Elastic Beanstalk, you’ll be able to reduce the time you take to manage database instances.

3. Repurchase

Repurchasing entails shifting a totally different product. It’s commonly seen as moving to a SaaS platform. Basically, it entails moving from CMS to Drupal, or HR System to Workday or CRM to Salesforce.com etc.

4. Refactor/Re-Architect

This is about re-imagining how an application is developed and architected using cloud-native features. It’s driven typically by a sound business that needs to scale, improve performance, or add features, which would otherwise be challenging to achieve within an app’s current environment.

If you’re looking to shift from monolithic architecture to a server-less or service-oriented architecture to improve business continuity or boost agility? This pattern is the best to help you achieve such a goal. While it might be expensive, if you possess an excellent product-market fit, it certainly can turn out to be highly beneficial.

5. Retire

After discovering everything in an environment, you need to ask every functional area about who owns every app. Did you know that 10 percent of an enterprise IP portfolio isn’t useful anymore? Did you also know that it can be turned off simply? Now that you know, it’s also important to appreciate that these savings can go miles to boost your business case, lessen the surface area that you should secure and direct the scarce attention of your team to those things that folks use.

6. Retain

You might still be riding out some depreciation but you are not ready to prioritize your recently upgraded application. It’s also possible that you aren’t inclined to migrating some apps. To be on the safe side, you need to migrate only what makes sense to your business. As the gravity of a portfolio shifts from on-premises to cloud, chances are high that you’ll have lesser reasons to retain.

The cloud migration process in any organization has the potential for failure. Your business has its unique design, which comes with its unique challenges hence that should be the driving process for coming up with a migration strategy. A clear realization of the purpose of the initiative will enable the company to allocate labor and resources to critical areas of the migration process and tighten the period for achieving the same.

Applications to be used in the migration process should also be clearly identified by how essential they are to the organization since they may be shut down at a certain point in the migration process and you should be able to know any consequences that may arise from that. Any effect on the operations of the business should be foreseen in order to avoid any cases of poor delivery of services or being unable to meet deadlines. This will save the organization a lot of money that would have been used to settle damages. The company should shut down all applications in the guise of maintenance in order for them to establish the speed with the applications come back online after the migration process.

A backup plan should be incorporated into the cloud in order for the organization to be confident of the thoroughness of the migration process by ensuring all and any risks that arise are mitigated. Cloud migration can also be reassuring to an organization when it collaborates with an organization that has been through a similar process in order for them to learn and reduce risks that are involved. Most companies are stuck after coming up with a strategy for migration mostly because they rely on their employees to facilitate the migration process instead of hiring experts with experience to manage it for them. This is a complex process and requires the best people to handle it for an organization.