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Cloud migration refers to the process of moving your data and applications to a Cloud.. It can occur either from a private server to the Cloud, from one Cloud to another, or even from one Cloud to multiple other Clouds.
However, moving a set of data and IT resources is not as simple as transferring files to an external hard drive. Your data is precious and must be handled with care, taking multiple parameters into account. To explain cloud migration simply, we liken it to moving house where you have many crystal services to pack, store, transport, and reinstall in a new home: this requires precise organisation, effective resource management, and particular attention to ensure nothing is lost or damaged in the process. Cloud migration allows you to access a more flexible environment, accessible from anywhere, while preserving the integrity and security of your activities.
As you can see, cloud migration is a major challenge for a company,which is why the best experts at Qim info are available to discuss this topic with you. Let’s start by looking at the reasons why companies migrate to the cloud.
Why Migrate to the Cloud?
How to Define the Cloud? The Cloud is a business model that provides access to IT services (storage, servers, networking, software) via the internet. Since the creation of the first Clouds in the early 2000s, the service has become increasingly popular, becoming ubiquitous in recent years, both for private companies and the general public.
The Cloud offers many advantages that justify considering migration:
- The hardware logistics are entirely delegated to the Cloud provider.
- It offers flexible infrastructures that allow you to adjust your offering based on the evolution of your needs.
- It also allows you to store a large volume of data and offers exceptional computing power.. These capabilities are supported by the regular construction of new Data Centres by providers, making them virtually limitless.
- The multitude of data centres also allows for the implementation of data redundancy over large areas, such as different continents, to meet legislative and technical needs (for example, disaster recovery plans).
- It represents a significant time saving for your company, as many technical and logistical constraints are directly handled by your provider, particularly on public Clouds.
- Your data and solutions are more easily accessiblewhen you have a good internet connection. However, although the Cloud aims for high availability, no service is available 100% of the time. Even the most reliable Cloud providers can experience downtime. This is where SLAs (a contract between the service provider and the user that defines the expected level of service) come into play: for Cloud services, the SLA usually specifies the expected availability of the service (for example, 99.9% of the time). It is possible to manage these downtimes by deploying redundant infrastructures.
- Cloud security is also a strong point, as you can benefit from the safety standards of major Cloud hosts.
- A Cloud allows you to share your data and applications much more easily and offers great mobility to employees.
- Finally, it helps reduce your investment costs thanks to its subscription system: indeed, with the Cloud’s economic model, you only pay for what you actually use. Moreover, some models allow you to delegate all maintenance to the Cloud provider, giving you the option to dispense with a specific technical team.
If you want to move towards the Cloud and its advantages by considering migration, our Cloud experts are here to support you. Indeed, a cloud migration is not improvised and requires specific skills. We even have a Cloud Consulting offer dedicated to studying the feasibility and cost of migration to the Cloud.
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Why Seek Support from a Cloud Migration Expert?
The data and applications you own and store are essential to your business, and any loss or alteration exposes you to disastrous consequences. Thus, calling on a cloud migration expert allows you to avoid as many difficulties as possible that an inexperienced internal team might face. Likewise, since cloud migration is delicate, delegating it to an expert saves you considerable time, which ultimately improves your time-to-market.
Additionally, it is crucial to take the time to properly establish the foundations of your new infrastructure, which will follow you for years. The foundations must be supported by at least two pillars: the architecture of the landing zone and its governance.
Why Not Call on Our Experts at Qim info for Their Cloud Migration Services?
With nearly 20 years of existence, Qim info is a dynamic IT services and consulting company, constantly growing, recruiting specialists who are experienced and passionate about their field.
Our strength is positioning ourselves as your close partner: we are always available to meet you on-site and take all the time needed to discuss your expectations. Our goal is to build a trustful relationship with you,which can extend over several projects. Whether we collaborate in delegation mode or project mode, whether your need is ambitious or more modest, rest assured that each of our services always includes the same level of requirement.
Cloud Expertise at Qim info
We are very proud of our Cloud expertise, represented by the “Cloud & DevOps Solutions” department of our Centre of Expertise. We work with you in project mode or through support packages and offer only tailored solutions. Thus, everything is done to automate and manage your processes around native Cloud solutions, but also to define your architecture and optimise costs. Our goal is to ensure the efficiency of your Cloud environment! We are at your disposal to study your precise needs and provide the best advice.
Moreover, it is worth detailing how a Cloud migration takes place.
How Does a Cloud Migration Take Place?
At Qim info, we envision a Cloud migration in four main steps.
Planning the Cloud Migration
Planning allows us to establish your migration strategy, which takes into account the specificities of your company, your business objectives, and the technical constraints throughout each step. For this, we need to:
- Conduct an inventory of the existing: you must, therefore, know your data well to be able to anticipate your needs: what is your current data volume? What are your constraints? What is your ecosystem: applications, authentication, database types? What are your processes? This is called the assessment.
- Query your needs, expectations, and processes: what additional services will you need? What problems do you face that need improvement?
- Evaluate security and compliance requirements to ensure that sensitive data remains protected during and after the migration.
- Determine a preliminary schedule and budget.
Meticulous planning is crucial to minimise risks and disruptions during the migration.
Choosing Your Environment and Strategy
Choosing an appropriate Cloud environment involves asking three questions:
- What type of Cloud do you need? A private or hybrid Cloud? Do you need to combine multiple Clouds to obtain a satisfactory information system?
- Which Cloud provider to choose? We have prepared a list further in this guide, and our experts aim to define with you the most suitable environment for your data, applications, and needs.
- What economic model to choose (IaaS, PaaS, and SaaS)? Feel free to consult our complete article on the Cloud for more information.
Once you have answered these questions, you now need to define your Cloud migration strategy, as there are several:
- Retire: identifying and eliminating unnecessary resources to reduce migration costs and complexity, much like you would before moving house.
- Retain or “keep”: identifying elements that will not be transferred to the Cloud for various reasons: outdated technology, prohibitive migration costs, data sensitivity, or systems that work perfectly on-premise.
- Relocate (Hypervisor-level Lift and Shift): this approach allows migrating workloads, such as Kubernetes pods or VSphere VMs, directly to the Cloud without interruption.
- Rehost (Lift and Shift): transferring your applications and data to the Cloud without major modifications.
- Repurchase: orienting your applications towards a native SaaS Cloud solution. For example, moving from a locally hosted CRM to a solution like Salesforce.
- Replatform: slightly adjusting or modifying your applications to benefit from native Cloud services.
- Refactor: completely redesigning your applications to fully leverage Cloud functionalities, such as adopting modern architectures like microservices or serverless solutions.
Architecture
Once the environment is chosen, our experts design the Cloud architecture that supports your applications and workloads. To summarise this step, it involves designing how your applications and data will be organised, deployed, and secured in the Cloud to meet your business needs. This involves considering many aspects:
- Services: indicating which Cloud services (storage, computing, databases…) to use to meet the needs of your applications.
- Deployment: choosing between virtual machines, containers, or serverless functions.
- Security: with firewalls, security groups, access policies…
- Scalability: ensuring your architecture can easily increase or decrease its capacity based on needs to maintain consistent performance.
- High availability: ensuring your applications are always available by configuring backups, data duplication, and disaster recovery plans. SLAs (contracts with cloud providers) guarantee a certain percentage of service availability within one month.
- Network: configuring private or public virtual networks, load balancers, gateways, etc.
- Integration: ensuring a seamless transition between your current infrastructure and the Cloud. This involves analysing and defining how your new Cloud applications will interact with your existing systems in terms of infrastructure, protocol, or data. In addition, we provide recommendations for making your current applications more compatible with Cloud paradigms, such as the Cloud Native approach..
- Costs: optimising them to ensure optimal performance for a reasonable budget. This is the essence of FinOps, as presented in our Cloud consulting article.
We’re almost there. Everything is ready for a successful migration.
Operation and Optimisation by Steps
Once the architecture is in place, we proceed with the migration and operation of your applications and data in the Cloud. This involves gradually migrating certain workloads, testing performance, adjusting parameters along the way, and ensuring everything works as expected.
It will also be the time to implement your governance, formalising new management processes and distributing responsibilities across your teams.
How Long Does a Cloud Migration Take?
As we have seen, a successful migration requires planning time, reflection, and constant adjustments. Thus, the planning stage of your Cloud migration allows us to estimate the necessary time.
Once your Cloud migration is well planned and successive iterations of data migration go smoothly, your Cloud migration should take on average from a few weeks to several months.. The duration depends on the number of resources, the complexity of the target infrastructure (interconnection), and the amount of data to be migrated.
How Much Do Cloud Migration Services Cost?
Just as with the migration duration, there is no standard budget for a Cloud migration. It will depend on six main cost areas:
- Cost of new Cloud resources: the amount depends on the Cloud services you adopt, such as storage, databases, or computing power. These services are generally billed on a pay-as-you-go model. To estimate these costs more precisely, dedicated calculation tools are available. Don’t forget to eliminate what is no longer necessary in your current infrastructure to avoid unnecessary expenses (retiring)!
- License fees: if your migration involves using specific software in the Cloud, license fees may apply. However, it is possible to integrate your own licenses to reduce these costs.
- Salaries: do not omit the costs related to the staff involved in planning, managing, and executing the migration. This includes the salaries of internal teams and the fees of external experts required for skills transfer or N3 support. Hiring experts, such as those from Qim info, obviously involves a budget.
- Bandwidth fees: transferring data to the Cloud, or from the Cloud, especially in large quantities, can incur additional fees, particularly if the volume of data to be transferred is significant.
- Security and compliance investments: ensuring the protection of your data may require investments in solutions such as firewalls, encryption, and other security tools.
- Operational interruption costs: some migration stages may cause temporary interruptions, impacting your current operations.
It is also good to note that Qim info works closely with major Cloud providers such as AWS, Azure, and Exoscale; thus, we can negotiate discounts for you. This can even extend to free services as part of proof-of-concept (PoC) demonstrations or migration projects.
Cloud Migration Services
list of the best Cloud migration services
that is up to date. We invite you to consult up-to-date comparisons and our offer on the feasibility and cost study of Cloud migration. A high-performance Cloud migration service is one that commits to handling several tasks with you. We invite you to keep this checklist and verify each point with your contact.| Action | Scope of Application |
| Define |
Cloud governance |
| Design: | An adapted and Cloud Native architecture, a strategy for compliance with legal constraints, a cybersecurity strategy. |
| Manage: | The migration (implementation) itself. |
What Are the Best Cloud Services to Migrate To?
At this point in the article, you might be expecting our answer: there is no service inherently better than another. A type, provider, or Cloud service is the best when it meets your needs and constraints. Nevertheless, here are some high-performance Cloud services to which we could direct you.
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Providers
According to a Synergy Research Group study,the providers dominating the Cloud market are Amazon, Microsoft, and Google. However, we can also mention the French OVH Cloud or the Swiss Exoscale, which are actively working towards digital sovereignty.
Software
Here is a list of useful types of software on the Cloud with some examples:
- Management and orchestration: Kubernetes (AKS, GKE, EKS), Docker, OpenShift.
- Monitoring and observability: Elastic Stack, Dynatrace, Datadog, Grafana, Prometheus, Amazon CloudWatch, Azure Monitor, Google Cloud Monitoring.
- Cost management and optimisation: AWS Cost Explorer, Azure Cost Management and Billing, Google Cloud Cost Management.
- Development and continuous integration: GitHub, GitLab CI/CD, Travis CI.
In conclusion, whether you are new to the Cloud or familiar with the topic, you now know why and how to organise your Cloud migration. This article has therefore presented the best solutions to prepare your Cloud migration with peace of mind!
Our Cloud & DevOps Solutions department is at your disposal to support you in your Cloud migration with peace of mind.
Clément Raussin
Responsable du département Cloud & DevOps Solutions chez Qim info
