AWS migration services were already available ten years ago. However, the services were not very standardized and had a high vendor lock-in, which meant that they were costly and enormously complex for many businesses to maintain.

As time passed, rapid developments started to happen everywhere, companies felt the urge to increase their agility. Increasing their agility enabled them to react flexibly to changes and adapt to new conditions or business areas quickly.

AWS and migration

AWS and its services can boost the agility of your business or optimize costs while being more efficient. But migrating servers to AWS cloud can also give you a hard time if your migration project has not been methodical and thoughtful enough. It involves asking many questions and providing relevant answers adapted to your particularities.

Changes - for better or for worse - would not be changes unless you had to overcome a few hurdles to get to the other side. Instead of jumping the gun, the saner thing to do is to get in touch with our team of AWS experts now!

Successful migration to AWS Cloud

Have you ever wondered what would happen if you adopted the cloud and later realize that your approach was wrong? What if you moved your most critical application to the cloud without expert guidance and are now worried about its security? Is repatriation a solution? Most of the time, it's not, considering the size of the data and the enormous costs you would incur for the whole process.

Challenges of migrating servers to AWS cloud

Determining whether the company resources are ready to migrate

If set up with foresight, AWS certainly has great transformation potential. However, it is not suitable for every application. A serious and costly mistake that companies often make is to believe that migrating to the public cloud is all about moving servers and applications to the cloud. Detailed knowledge of the other AWS migration services and services of other domains is a must to build a suitable migration strategy. 

Before each migration, you should check whether your resources are ready to be migrated to the cloud. Migrating legacy systems becomes the biggest challenge for most companies. You must come out with immediate solutions that can help you out in the long-term. This is the only way to utilize the pre-configured platform capabilities that AWS provides.

Determining the costs and the scalability needs

AWS offers scalability, which is one of the critical features as it compels businesses to hop in to use its services. For companies that experience fluctuating traffic throughout the day, this comes as a boon and a great way to reduce their storage and compute costs. However, this does not mean that the feature is suitable for every industry, for example, businesses with stable workloads. One wrong move, and you may end up paying for the AWS services which your business may never need. A cost estimate which rightly considers all your needs can help you remain safe from inappropriate spending.

Planning for data security and compliance

Data security is the biggest concern that can keep you from migrating to the AWS cloud. However, the security measures that AWS takes guarantee equivalent or better security on the cloud than what you have on-premises. Lack of information on questions like which data can be stored on the cloud, which AWS migration services are the most secure, and how to manage the data with secure access are the hurdles that most businesses face before a successful migration to the AWS cloud.

The advantages of the AWS cloud and its compute services are apparent. But is there a universal solution to migration? No, but proper planning and implementing the correct migration strategy can ensure a successful migration.

The lack of planning and poor execution has kept many companies away from the benefits of AWS. The best way to ensure that none of that happens in the first place is to get in touch with an expert team that can make the migration fruitful.

The correct strategy for using AWS migration services

When it comes to migration strategies, the R Group approach is considered to be the most common to migrate to the AWS cloud.

1. Rehost (Lift & Shift)
   It is the simplest of all AWS migration models, but also the one that's most likely to cause problems by increasing costs and security issues. Rehosting (also called "Lift and Shift"), replicates an existing system on a public cloud infrastructure. It's like lifting an application along with its OS, configuration, and other elements, and shifting it from your existing data center to run it in the AWS cloud.
   
   This approach has the advantage of being quick and straightforward, but it also means that any inefficiency or failure on the existing application is also transferred to the cloud. Many of the negative experiences reported about cloud migration projects are because companies chose to re-host without thoroughly assessing the impact of this decision.
   
   

2. Replatform (Lift, Tinker, and Shift)
   Replatforming involves a certain degree of analysis to identify the processes and services that can be withdrawn from your existing operations for your benefit. Making a few cloud optimizations, experts can reduce operating costs and take full advantage of certain AWS native functionalities like auto-scaling or auto-recovery.
   
   

3. Retain
   Consider an application that has a sunset in the future or has some complex requirement which doesn't allow it to be migrated without some significant changes. Therefore you have decided to run it in your data center. In such cases, you keep this application as it is, and focus on the other applications that are to be moved to the cloud.
   
   

4. Retire
   This is when you decide to retire an application because it has some duplicated functionality, or it has some function that is no longer useful. Therefore the application will no longer be used and can finally be shut down and disposed of.
   
   

5. Refactoring (Re-architect)
   Refactoring, which is the most advanced approach, consists of restructuring applications and processes to take full advantage of AWS cloud services. You re-architect the software, add some of the advantageous AWS services like Elastic Beanstalk or Amazon RDS to suit your business model and requirements. This approach ensures that the use of AWS cloud resources is optimized for better billing control.
   
   

6. Repurchasing
   As the name suggests, the strategy involves buying a SaaS version of an existing application. For instance, switching to Salesforce from a CRM or switching to Workday from an existing HR tool.

BOTTOMLINE

To stay ahead, the cloud has enabled companies to collaborate with artificial intelligence, identify challenges, and experiment with new technologies. For this reason, some of the biggest companies you know have not only migrated systems and applications to the AWS cloud but entire ideas. It's time you start migrating servers to AWS now.
Get in touch with our team of experts to know more about AWS migration services.