Twelve years ago, a Wakefield Research survey revealed that 1 in 3 Americans thought cloud computing was somehow related to the weather. Fast forward to today, 67% of enterprise infrastructure in the US is cloud-based.

Given that 92% of enterprises already have a multi-cloud strategy in place or in the works, it’s evident that embracing cloud migration is no longer just an option but a strategic necessity.

While migrating from on-premise to the cloud has many benefits, it’s important to know the challenges your organization may face. In this blog, you will learn about on-premise to cloud migration, its different types, challenges, and best practices.

What is On-Premise to Cloud Migration?

An on-premise to cloud migration entails moving infrastructure and data from an on-premise system (third-party data centers or infrastructure housed locally) to the cloud (public, private, or hybrid).

But why should you consider an on-premise to cloud migration?

By moving your data and infrastructure to the cloud, your organization can be more flexible and scalable, not to mention the savings in operational costs. The cloud offers many other benefits, too (more on that later).

4 Types of On-Premise to Cloud Migration Approaches

Since cloud data migration isn’t a one-size-fits-all solution, it’s crucial to understand the different types before deciding on a strategy that works best for your organization. Here’s an overview of common on-premise to cloud migration strategies:

1. Rehosting or “Lift-and-Shift” Migration

The simplest type of on-premise to cloud migration is the lift-and-shift migration. If you’re simply moving your infrastructure and data to the cloud, you’re performing a lift-and-shift. While it’s an easy migration, it limits your organization as your applications aren’t modified to be cloud native.

2. Refactoring or “Rip and Replace” Migration

Refactoring is much more resource-intensive than rehosting because it involves rewriting the architecture for your applications and modifying your data and schema. However, it is a suitable approach if you want to take advantage of the latest features that your cloud migration service provider is offering.

3. Replatforming or “Move and Improve” Migration

The replatforming approach lies between rehosting and refactoring. It involves changing some aspects of your applications while retaining the core functionalities. For instance, to make your application cloud-native, you may change how it interacts with the database.

4. Replacing or “Shift to SaaS” Migration

This approach involves moving your data to cloud-based SaaS platforms from your legacy systems. This approach works best if your organization uses dated legacy tools and would benefit from moving to third-party SaaS options.

Benefits of Migrating from On-Premise to Cloud

Cloud migration is more than just a simple transfer activity. Your organization will need to strategize and plan carefully to execute it. Plus, you’ll need a specialized cloud migration solution to ensure your data’s security, integrity, and availability.

Gartner predicts that by 2027, more than 70% of enterprises will leverage cloud platforms to accelerate their business initiatives. Migrating to the cloud offers numerous benefits, and knowing how it’ll help your organization is important.

Here are some benefits of migrating to the cloud:

1.   Operational Cost Savings

A Microsoft survey revealed that 82% of small to mid-sized businesses reported experiencing reduced costs after migrating from on-premise to cloud. However, these benefits aren’t limited to small businesses. For instance, Coca-Cola reported 40% operational savings after migrating to the cloud.

The pay-as-you-go model commonly used in cloud services makes hosting your data and infrastructure on the cloud cost-effective. It eliminates the need for your organization to invest upfront in software, hardware, and IT infrastructure.

Plus, the cloud service provider bears the cost of system maintenance and upgrades, further improving cost-effectiveness for you.

2.   Flexibility and Scalability

60% of businesses reported that their cloud capabilities helped them sustain or increase revenue. Similarly, Netflix’s ten-year cloud migration is a huge success story. The streaming company moved its infrastructure to the cloud, helping it achieve global reach and seamless scalability. Today, Netflix leverages the cloud to deliver a seamless streaming experience to millions of users worldwide.

Migrating to the cloud lets you scale and be flexible in multiple ways, such as:

• The ability to pay only for the cloud resources you use lets your organization manage expenses without overspending.
• You can better manage demand spikes or more powerful computing requirements by modifying your cloud resource instantly and on demand.
• You can opt for a hybrid-cloud approach if you have invested significantly in on-premises infrastructure. It involves moving some of your workloads to the cloud while keeping others on-premises.
• The majority of the cloud service providers ensure a global presence, letting you improve performance by keeping your workloads closer to your customers or users.

3.   Security and Compliance

According to Oracle, 6 in 10 C-suite executives feel security is the biggest benefit of migrating to the cloud, ahead of cost-efficiency, scalability, or ease of management. Similarly, 94% of small businesses have reported experiencing security benefits since moving to the cloud.

Most public clouds offer built-in security features and specialized cloud security add-ons to help protect your organization’s resources. Similarly, most cloud vendors offer specialized offerings to help your organization comply with regulations like GDPR (General Data Protection Regulation) and HIPAA (Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act).

4.   Easy collaboration

Migrating to the cloud can help your teams collaborate, regardless of their physical location. Teams can improve productivity and efficiency by simultaneously accessing, sharing, and working on the same data assets. In fact, 59% of businesses have reported increased productivity after moving to the cloud.

5. Business continuity

Cloud infrastructure providers can help your organization improve business continuity through built-in backup and disaster recovery features. Moreover, data stored in the cloud is generally spread across multiple servers in different locations.

This inherent redundancy allows for quicker data recovery, facilitating business continuity. That’s why 48% of businesses store their most essential data on the cloud.

6. Innovation and competitive advantage

Data migration from on-premise to cloud lets your company innovate and gain a competitive advantage. Many cloud providers offer access to advanced analytics, AI, and ML capabilities, letting you transform data into insights.

These insights facilitate data-driven decision-making, allowing your company to get ahead of the competition by leveraging data. In fact, according to McKinsey, data-driven organizations are 23 times more likely to acquire customers.

7. Strategic resource management

An on-premise to cloud migration approach frees up valuable company resources. By moving your infrastructure to the cloud, you can strategically utilize your IT resources to provide customers with more value.

On-Premise to Cloud Migration Challenges

As you strategize your data migration from on-premises to the cloud, the following are some potential data migration challenges you should be mindful of:

• Data Loss and Integrity Challenges: There’s a considerable risk of data loss and corruption during an on-premise to cloud migration. To resolve this, back up your data and have a recovery plan.
• Downtime & Loss of Productivity: When migrating from on-premise to the cloud, you’ll need to turn off a local server at some point. The resulting downtime may be unavoidable but can be minimized through careful planning.
• Security Risks: Migrating your data can expose its security vulnerabilities. This can be tackled with appropriate encryption and access control measures, as discussed.
• Compliance: If your organization handles sensitive data, such as financial or personal information, compliance with relevant regulations is necessary during migration and on your new cloud platform.
• Cost Overruns: According to McKinsey, 75% of cloud migration projects exceed budget. The overruns are primarily credited to lapses in coordination throughout the migration process.

5 Best Practices for a Successful On-Premise to Cloud Migration

The success of your migration will depend on your expected outcomes, so there’s no definitive guide for it. Still, these are the best practices you can follow to assess your data and cloud needs and execute a successful migration:

1.   Planning and Assessment

1. Inventory: This step should involve a detailed inventory of your data and infrastructure that needs to be migrated. This inventory will include your databases, system files, applications, and relevant metadata.
2. Data Dependencies:Once you have completed the inventory, you should assess data dependencies. This is crucial to understanding how different data sets relate and deciding the migration sequence.
3. Data Classification: The next step is to classify your data on the basis of sensitivity, compliance requirements, and business criticality.
4. Choosing a Service Provider: Once you have assessed your data needs, it’s time to select a suitable service provider and the best migration tool for your data needs.

2.   Data Cleansing and Preparation

Data cleansing and preparation can involve deduplicating your data sets to ensure high data quality and transforming your data format to one supported by the cloud platform.

Read more: Practical Tips to Tackle Data Quality Issues During Cloud Migration

3.   Data Security and Compliance

Encrypting your data at rest and in transit is a good way of maintaining data security. You should also ensure the migration follows the relevant privacy and data protection regulations. This process will require employing appropriate data access controls and conducting regular audits.

4.   Data Backup and Recovery

You should also create backups before the migration to avoid data loss while developing a recovery plan to tackle any unexpected issues during or after the migration.

5.   Testing and Validation

Conducting a test migration with a sample data set will help you troubleshoot any potential problems. Once the migration is complete, you can verify data integrity by conducting a data validation check.

Role of Data Governance in Cloud Migration

When migrating your data from on-prem to the cloud, you may overlook the documentation and design of data governance processes. This mistake can lead to problems later.

For instance, ignoring data governance during the migration can lead to hours spent cleansing legacy data in the new cloud environment.

Establishing strong data governance measures during the migration is crucial. Here’s how data governance can positively impact the four crucial phases of an on-premise to cloud migration process:

Phase 1: Data Preparation

Involve relevant people and assign roles: Engaging relevant data owners and users can help you assess the reliability of the data. Moreover, you will be able to establish a responsibility and ownership structure for the different steps of the migration process. For instance, some will oversee the preparation step of the migration process, while others can identify what needs to be migrated.

Phase 2: Data Mapping

Create a Data Dictionary: In this step, you should document what data exists, in what format, and where it’ll go in the new environment. This process helps establish a shared language and understanding of the data among all stakeholders.

Define Relationships: By understanding the existing data dependencies, you can ensure you accurately migrate all the data.

Phase 3: Data Cleansing

Data quality and data normalization are the two crucial data governance principles you should emphasize during this step.

Establish Clear Quality Rules: Data quality rules should be central to your migration efforts. These rules will also be the foundation for handling data in your new cloud environment.

Focus on Data Quality: Data cleansing should help ensure your data meets these established rules by removing errors and inconsistencies.

Phase 4: Data Integration

Establish a Single Source of Truth: A centralized repository for your data ensures everyone uses the same reliable information. This helps ensure transparency and accountability about where the data originates during and after the migration.

Document the Flow of Data: By tracking where data originates and how it flows through the system, you can inform future data governance practices and identify areas that require extra integration controls.

In short, establishing robust data governance during your on-premise to cloud migration ensures data integrity, security, and compliance.

On-Premise to Cloud Migration Tools: What To Look For

Here’s what you should look for when deciding on which solution to rely on for your on-premise to cloud migration:

• Ease of Use: Look for a solution with a user-friendly interface, abundant training resources, and reliable customer support. These features will help your business users become involved in the migration process while quickly getting your teams up to speed.
• Compatibility: The solution should be compatible with legacy systems and the cloud environment. You should also check if it can handle the data formats and types that your organization typically uses.
• Migration-specific Features: Go for a solution that can automate tasks such as database consolidation, data synchronization, etc., while being customizable for your specific cloud migration needs.
• Scalability: Choose a solution that can scale as your organization’s data and cloud needs grow. Evaluate if it can handle large data volumes without compromising performance.

Concluding Thoughts

An on-premise to cloud migration is a significant opportunity for your organization to enhance operational efficiency and scalability and gain a competitive advantage.

By understanding the different approaches to migrations, their benefits, challenges, and best practices, you can select an on-premise to cloud migration solution that aligns with your data and cloud needs.

Astera, an enterprise-grade, no-code, automated data management solution, is the answer. Astera enables businesses like yours to migrate data from their legacy sources to a cloud-based platform by streamlining data integration.

Astera supports complex data transformations to help you cleanse, validate, and standardize data during migration. Moreover, the Data Governance module lets you deploy and catalog your data assets, manage access from a centralized interface, and enhance data discoverability.

It’s a versatile solution that can be implemented on-premises and in the cloud to execute a smooth migration.

Astera’s new-gen solution, Astera Data Pipeline Accelerator, is the right fit for your cloud migration needs. Here’s how:

• By reducing the ETL project implementation timeline it lets you perform large-scale migrations within weeks instead of years.
• By letting automation handle the grunt work, you only have to specify the source and destination to move data between two environments.
• By working with data models and databases instead of working on individual data sets, you can implement large-scale changes in no time.
• Since changes are implemented in runtime, you can cleanse and transform your data in real-time.

Book a demo to learn how Astera can help with your on-premises to cloud migration.