How to Migrate Critical Applications from On-Premise to AWS Cloud?

In today’s digital era, businesses are increasingly adopting cloud computing to leverage its scalability, flexibility, and cost-efficiency. Moving critical applications from on-premise infrastructure to the AWS Cloud offers numerous benefits, including enhanced performance, improved security, and simplified management.

In this blog, we will explore the process of migrating critical applications from on-premise to AWS Cloud, the migration tools available, and the compelling reasons to choose cloud over on-premise infrastructure.

What is AWS Migration?

AWS migration is the process of moving an organization’s applications, data, and infrastructure from an on-premises environment or other cloud providers to Amazon Web Services (AWS) cloud. This can include moving virtual machines, databases, applications, storage, and other resources.

The AWS migration process involves identifying the right migration strategy, planning the migration, executing the migration, and validating the success of the migration. There are several migration strategies available, such as rehosting, replatforming, repurchasing, refactoring, and retiring, which can be chosen based on an organization’s needs and goals.

What are the three phases of the AWS Migration process?

1. Plan: In this phase, the organization identifies the applications, data, and infrastructure that need to be migrated to AWS. This involves analyzing the existing environment, defining the goals and requirements, selecting the appropriate migration strategy, and creating a detailed migration plan that includes timelines, costs, and resource requirements.
2. Migrate: In this phase, the organization executes the migration plan by moving the applications, data, and infrastructure to AWS. This involves setting up the AWS environment, migrating the data and applications, configuring the networking and security, and testing and validating the migrated environment to ensure it meets the business requirements.
3. Operate: In this phase, the organization optimizes and manages the migrated environment in AWS. This involves monitoring the performance, security, and availability of the applications and infrastructure, optimizing the environment for cost and performance, and implementing best practices for operations and security.

These three phases are iterative and continuous, with organizations continuously monitoring and optimizing their environment to ensure it meets their business needs and objectives.

AWS provides various migration tools and services to support organizations throughout the migration process, including AWS Database Migration Service, AWS Server Migration Service, AWS Migration Hub, AWS Application Discovery Service, and AWS CloudEndure Migration.

Application Migration Strategies

There are several cloud migration strategies that organizations can choose from when migrating their applications to the cloud. The selection of a particular strategy depends on factors such as the application architecture, business needs, migration goals, and time and budget constraints. Here are some of the common cloud migration strategies:

1. Rehosting (Lift and Shift): This strategy involves moving the application to the cloud without making any changes to the application architecture or functionality. This is often the fastest and easiest migration strategy, as it requires minimal changes to the application, but it may not leverage the full potential of cloud computing.
2. Replatforming (Lift, Tinker, and Shift): This strategy involves making some changes to the application architecture or components to take advantage of cloud-native features such as scalability, high availability, and fault tolerance, without changing the core functionality of the application.
3. Refactoring (Re-architect): This strategy involves redesigning and rebuilding the application to take advantage of cloud-native features and services, such as serverless computing, containers, and microservices. This strategy requires more effort and resources than rehosting or replatforming, but it can offer significant benefits in terms of scalability, agility, and cost savings.
4. Repurchasing (Drop and Shop): This strategy involves replacing the existing application with a commercially available SaaS solution, which can offer similar or better functionality than the existing application. This strategy is often used when the existing application is outdated or no longer meets the business needs.
5. Retiring: This strategy involves decommissioning the applications or components that are no longer needed or used by the organization. This can reduce the maintenance costs and complexity of the IT environment.

Overall, selecting the right cloud migration strategy requires careful analysis of the application architecture, business needs, migration goals, and available resources, to ensure a successful and cost-effective migration to the cloud.

Why Companies are moving to the Cloud?

Companies are moving to the cloud for a variety of reasons, including

1. Cost Savings: Cloud computing offers cost savings in terms of reduced infrastructure costs, lower maintenance costs, and the ability to pay for only the resources used.
2. Scalability and Flexibility: Cloud computing provides scalability and flexibility, allowing organizations to scale up or down based on demand and quickly adapt to changing business needs.
3. Accessibility: Cloud computing enables employees to access applications and data from anywhere, as long as they have an internet connection.
4. Security: Cloud providers invest heavily in security, offering robust security features and services that can be easily integrated into an organization’s application architecture.
5. Innovation: Cloud computing provides access to advanced technologies and services such as AI, machine learning, IoT, and big data analytics, enabling organizations to innovate and develop new products and services.
6. Disaster Recovery: Cloud computing provides robust disaster recovery capabilities, enabling organizations to quickly recover from disasters such as natural disasters, cyberattacks, and hardware failures.
7. Compliance: Cloud providers offer compliance certifications and services, helping organizations meet regulatory requirements and industry standards.

Why Move from On-Premise to AWS Cloud

1. Scalability: On-premise infrastructure requires significant upfront investment to accommodate future growth. In contrast, the AWS Cloud provides elastic scalability, allowing you to easily scale your resources up or down based on demand, ensuring optimal performance and cost-effectiveness.
2. Cost Efficiency: Cloud computing eliminates the need for large capital expenditures on hardware, maintenance, and upgrades. With AWS, you pay for what you use, reducing operational costs and providing better cost predictability.
3. Improved Security: AWS Cloud offers robust security measures, including data encryption, network isolation, and access controls. AWS also provides compliance certifications and a shared responsibility model, where AWS manages the underlying infrastructure security, while you focus on securing your applications and data.
4. High Availability and Disaster Recovery: AWS Cloud provides built-in features for high availability and disaster recovery, such as automated backups, replication across multiple availability zones, and easy data replication between regions. This ensures minimal downtime and faster recovery in case of any unforeseen events.
5. Agility and Innovation: Cloud computing enables faster deployment of applications and facilitates continuous integration and delivery (CI/CD) practices. AWS offers a wide range of managed services, such as databases, machine learning, analytics, and serverless computing, empowering organizations to innovate and rapidly respond to changing business needs.

On-Premise to AWS Cloud Migration Process

1. Assessment: Begin by conducting a comprehensive assessment of your on-premise applications, infrastructure, dependencies, and performance requirements. Identify the critical applications that will be migrated to AWS Cloud.
2. Cloud Architecture Design: Based on the assessment, design an optimal cloud architecture for your applications. Leverage AWS Well-Architected Framework to ensure reliability, security, performance efficiency, and cost optimization.
3. Data Migration: Develop a data migration strategy that suits your application’s requirements. AWS provides various services like AWS Database Migration Service (DMS) and AWS Snowball to simplify the migration of databases and large volumes of data.
4. Application Refactoring: Evaluate your applications for any necessary changes to make them cloud-native. This may involve redesigning components, leveraging AWS managed services, or refactoring code to maximize cloud benefits.
5. Testing and Validation: Set up a staging environment on AWS to validate the migrated applications. Perform comprehensive testing to ensure functionality, performance, and compatibility with AWS services.
6. Cut-Over and Go-Live: Plan a well-structured cut-over strategy to minimize disruption during the final migration phase. Implement the necessary DNS and networking configurations to direct traffic to the AWS resources. Monitor the applications closely after go-live to ensure smooth operation.

On-Premise to AWS Cloud Migration Tools

The following is a list of some commonly used on-premise to AWS cloud migration tools

1. AWS Server Migration Service (SMS): Simplifies the migration of on-premise virtual machines (VMs) to AWS EC2 instances.
2. AWS Database Migration Service (DMS): Facilitates the migration of on-premise databases to AWS RDS or Aurora with minimal downtime.
3. AWS Snowball: Enables secure and efficient transfer of large amounts of data to AWS by physically shipping the data on a storage device.
4. AWS Application Discovery Service: Helps in identifying and assessing on-premise applications and dependencies to streamline the migration process.

Ready to take your business to the next level? Contact us today to learn more about our expert cloud migration services and how we can help you achieve your goals.

Our team of experienced migration specialists is here to guide you through every step of the process and ensure a seamless transition to the cloud. Don’t wait any longer – let’s get started today!