7Rs Strategies of Cloud Migration

7Rs Strategies of Cloud Migration

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Adopting cloud computing for your business means welcoming quick innovation, security, flexibility, and cost-effectiveness to the business.

Well, this picture seems quite funny, but it reflects the present scenario. Once you choose to move your application to the cloud, it actually gives you the feeling of being on cloud nine for all of the following benefits it provides:

• Scalability: By migrating from on-premise infrastructure to cloud, you can manage to support larger workloads and more users.
• Cost: By migrating to the cloud you can also reduce your cost of IT operation as cloud providers will take care of maintenance and updates.

• Performance: Performance and end-to-end user experience will improve once you migrate to the cloud. Applications and websites which are hosted in clouds can easily serve more users.
• Digital experience: One of the important benefits of migrating to the cloud is providing the users with flexibility as users can access cloud services  from anywhere in the world.

Although moving to the cloud can be your best decision ever, you have to consider many factors before moving your application to the cloud for long-term business prosperity, as many organizations have complex architecture and many critical applications on-premise.

Gartner’s 7R’s framework can help you to decide which application to move and when and why.

The 7R strategies for migrating to the cloud

1. Rehost(Lift and shift)
2. Replatform
3. Refactor
4. Remediate
5. Repurchase
6. Retire
7. Retain

1.   Rehost(Lift and shift)

If you are just beginning with migrating the application to the cloud then you may start with this strategy. As the name suggests, it involves lifting the part or whole of the application form on-premise to the existing cloud environment or to a new cloud environment.

This doesn’t involve any modification unless you decide to migrate an application from one cloud to another cloud environment.

One can choose the rehost strategy

1. If they want to migrate with  minimum investment of time and money
2. If they want to quickly reduce infrastructure costs 
3. If they want the application to keep on running without any disruption or modification
4. If they have commercial or off-the-shelf applications
5. If they have certain applications which can be optimized easily after moving to the cloud.

Pros and cons of Rehost

Pros

• It’s cost-effective as it doesn’t require coding or making changes to the system
• It helps you to migrate critical core services quickly and directly with minimum risk and disruption to business activity
• It provides easy compliance and security management.

Cons

• Rehosted applications cannot scale and do not allow for distributed workloads like cloud-native applications
• These applications might suffer from latency or performance issues after migration
• Chances of migration failure are there, if the applications have not been tested or configured before migration

2.   Replatform

This is almost like rehost, except it involves little modification in some or entire part of the application before moving to the cloud. Experts have confirmed that this small modification or cloud optimization can bring significant benefits without changing its whole architecture. 

Replatform involves transformation of the underlying database and operating system, change of app server and  web server as well.

One can choose replatform strategy 

• If they are confident about the good functioning of application after minor changes
• If they are willing to automate certain tasks, like database migration
• If they want to leverage more cloud benefits
• If on-premise infrastructure is complex and difficult to scale

Pros and cons of replatform

Pros

• It is cost-effective, as it does not require a major infrastructure change
• It allows applications to leverage cloud capabilities, like auto-scaling, managed storage, and data processing services.

Cons

• It requires some amount of automation to achieve the level of flexibility when operating the system in the cloud
• Sometimes “scope creep” can turn a replatform project to refactor project, which requires skill.

 3.   Refactor

This strategy involves major changes in the application configuration before moving to cloud. It’s an approach that requires  investment of time and money.

 For example, if your existing application requires more resources which in turn causes you larger cloud billing then redesigning the application can be the best solution.

 In this case, you have two choices of refactoring, partial or complete. A partial refactor involves a small amount of modification, hence it can be migrated fast, while a complete refactor takes a longer time but it delivers higher performance.

 One can choose refactor strategy 

• If additional features are required for desired performance, which can’t be achieved with existing one
• If they want to scale existing application
• If they want to boost agility or improve business continuity.
• If they want to move to service-oriented architecture

 Pros and cons of Refactor

Pros

• It doesn’t require many resources, which helps to scale, and provides long-lasting ROI.
• It’s easy to add new features to modify the existing functionality as per customer requirement.

 Cons

• Time consuming 
• It requires advanced coding, automation, and DevOps skills
• Tinkering with legacy code might introduce errors after migration

 4.      Remediate

Remediate is a cloud migration technique that is more invasive and costly. The Enterprise upgrades operating systems, databases, web servers, etc. on the cloud. 

This technique helps to improve functionality, performance, and security and also helps to reduce vulnerabilities.

 5. Repurchase   

You can opt for this strategy if your application is not designed to run on cloud infrastructure. For example CRM. This means you have to end existing licensing and repurposing on a new platform or service.

 This strategy is not applicable for the applications which have been written with modem code, as it’s possible to transfer this code from one provider to another. This strategy is most commonly used for proprietary data-based platforms or products.

 6. Retain

During the cloud migration process, there must be some applications that don’t require migration, and you feel more comfortable by keeping them on-premise. In this case, you can retain aspects of your IT services in the current environment and implement a hybrid or part migration strategy.

 7. Retire

This involves identifying the services and assets that are no longer required. Retiring the service or application is important to save costs when they are not meeting any objective.

Which R to choose

Each of the four migration methods i.e Rehost, Replatform, Refactor, and Relocate has its own pros and cons, it’s sometimes difficult to choose one and to gain all the advantages. 

However, Organization can achieve more of the Cloud’s agility, reliability, scalability, security, and cost reduction if it invests more to optimize the application. To choose the mid-way ,an organization can rehost the workload on the Cloud and subsequently Refactor it, once running in the cloud. This way organizations can get quickly to the Cloud and can achieve the long-term benefits that the Cloud brings.

Three factors to consider while opting for a Cloud migration

• The required amount of upfront investment: The organization should be clear with the amount of time, effort, and skill required to migrate the application, along with the risk of remaining on-premise or failing to adapt the application on the Cloud.
• Desired outcome:  It should be clear in your mind what are the areas you want to improve after migration such as higher resiliency, availability, and performance, or the reduction in operating cost.
• Required collaboration with IT:  If you are choosing Refactor or Replace, then you need to work hand-in-hand with the IT department for technical  analysis.