The Fastest Cloud Migration Strategy

A lift-and-shift migration is a common cloud migration strategy for migrating applications to the cloud without redesigning them. This approach provides the fastest path to the cloud in a cost-efficient way that also relieves technical debt.  Once completed, a lift-and-shift migration provides the environment needed to redesign the application and take advantage of more cloud features.

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6 Challenges of the Data Center Status Quo

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Staying with an on-premises data center doesn’t mean your data and application are standing still. They are moving backward and becoming more obsolete by the minute. These are the challenges faced by organizations thinking of a lift-and-shift migration:

1. Data Center Lock-In:  Moving data between on-premises data centers can be difficult. Switching regions or vendors is costly and time consuming. This leaves applications open to the risk of catastrophic failure with little recourse.
2. Database Recoverability: Manual, in-person intervention is required to restore database services in the event of power loss or reboot.
3. Aging Hardware: Risk of outage due to a hardware malfunction grows over time.
4. Scalability: Growth and the ability to dynamically adjust resources based on need is challenging in the traditional data center model for various reasons: cost, time and labor, and hardware requirements. There are also no capabilities to scale backward or forward on demand.
5. Disaster Recovery: Traditional backup methods have proved problematic in the past and require frequent manual verification. Backup recovery is also very time consuming.
6. Redundancy: Creating a multi-region resilient architecture on a traditional data center architecture proves challenging in a practical sense.

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Lift-and-Shift Migration Solves these Challenges

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Each of the above six challenges can be immediately solved by a strategic lift-and-shift migration to the cloud-- and a cloud infrastructure provides future benefits not even dreamed of in the traditional data center model.

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Immediate Benefits of Lift-and-Shift Migration

1. Eliminate Data Center Lock-In:  Shifting into the cloud gives the ability to easily move resources between regions as needed.  
2. Automated Database Recoverability and Redundancy: With a cloud database solution, traditional data center power issues do not exist. Database services do not need reboot or manual intervention.
3. No Aging Hardware:  The very nature of cloud infrastructure eliminates this challenge. AWS’s Shared Responsibility Model gives more detail. 
4. Easy Scalability:  Cloud infrastructure provides not only the ability to scale out or up, but to scale down as well. As an organization grows, resources can be easily adjusted as needed.  
5. Automated Disaster Recovery:  In the rare event that a cloud region is affected by a disaster, data snapshots are replicated to different regions. These are automated backup solutions with rapid recovery times.
6. Enhanced Monitoring and Alerting:  Bloomip’s cloud monitoring platform is feature rich and can include sending alert notifications, as well as performing auto-recovery tasks.

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Additional Benefits of Lift-and-Shift Migration

For specific organizations, these additional benefits of lift-and-shift migration are key to success in the cloud.

1. Further Redundancy: A cloud database solution provides the proper infrastructure and capability to create applications in a multi-regional architecture, allowing for continuation of service in the rare case of regional outages. 
2. Templating: Applications can be converted into templates that can easily be deployed as needed.  The environment allows agile development and changes. 
3. Multi-region Solutions:  With cloud infrastructure, establishing environments across multiple regions around the globe happens quickly. 
4. Temporary or Permanent Test/Dev/Staging Environments:  The “On Demand” nature of cloud infrastructure allows an organization to quickly provision additional environments for purposes of testing, development, or staging.
   

Lift-and-shift migration is a core service Bloomip provides organizations of all sizes. If you’re ready to tackle the challenges of your traditional data center, contact us.