Cloud migration: Benefits and Risks

 Cloud migration is the process of partially or completely transitioning application, data or any business component to a cloud computing environment. There can be three types of cloud migration, first, migrate application and data from on-premises data center to the cloud. Second, is reverse of the first, migrate application and data back to the on-premise data center. And third, migrate application and data from one cloud provider to another cloud provider.

In this blog I will talk about the benefits and risks of the first type of cloud migration, that is the migration of data and application from on-site to the cloud.

Benefits:

Fast-growing organizations migrate to the cloud to keep the pace of their growth.

Below are the main benefits of migration application and data from on-premise to cloud.

Scalability: Scalability is one of the big reason for the success of cloud computing. In the on-premise data center, it is difficult to scale resource on the fly to cater to growing demands.

Cost Efficient: Organizations do not have to spend a huge amount of money on data center maintenance, capacity planning, and hardware. You will have a choice of control level of infrastructure with as-a-service options, like IaaS, PaaS, SaaS, FaaS.

Efficiency and agility: Cloud computing enables organizations to get their product to the market with speed. Cloud-based application and data can be accessed from anywhere with any internet-connected device.

Focus on business: Instead of capacity planning and data center maintenance, an organization can focus on its core business so that its growth can be accelerated.

Risks:

There are risks involved in cloud migration, it is very important to identify if any risk is involved in migration. Some risks are as below.

The complexity of the existing system: Assessment of complexity of the current application and finding out all the dependencies of that application is equally important for a successful migration to the cloud. If the application is very complex and working perfectly fine in on-premise, traffic is constant and predicted to be constant or having liner growth, you may think twice before deciding it to migrate to the cloud. You should also check eligibility of application to migrate to the cloud. The application may face latency issue after moving to the cloud because microservices will communicate over the network. It is very important to know what it takes to modernize application to work in the cloud.

Security: When you are migrating sensitive data, you may not have full control of your data. Also because of compliance requirements, you may not choose to store sensitive data in the cloud. Check this blog to learn more about security: https://ashu.tech.blog/2019/04/12/cloud-security-vulnerabilities-and-threats/

Vendor lock-in: When a customer uses proprietary product and services provided by a cloud vendor and can not migrate back to the on-premise or cannot switch to another vendor product and applications easily is known as vendor lock-in. To avoid vendor lock-in client should negotiate entry and exit strategy with cloud vendor during a migration strategy.