Cloud migration offers immense benefits to organizations and to name a few are scalability, cost-effectiveness, and increased performance. In this post learn about the strategy built upon 5R which can be implemented by organizations to migrate applications to the cloud.
Gartner, a highly influential information technology research company, describes 5 options for organizations migrating to the cloud. These cloud migration strategies are commonly known as the “5 R’s”.
Developing a Migration strategy
Organizations should not miss out on the opportunity to modernize considering today’s IT ecosystem. The cloud migration strategy adopted by your organization is the vision of how to move your applications to the cloud.
Every organization has different business requirements and hence will follow a slightly different process in cloud migration. They need to decipher what is in their environment, what are the interdependencies, what is going to be easy and hard to migrate, and how they’ll migrate each application.
Organizations must have a proper plan and approach to migrate each of their application and in what order to do it. A successful strategy will maximize your value from cloud infrastructure while minimizing migration time, effort, cost, and risk.
Let us understand the 5R strategy to migrate applications to cloud:
1. Rehost
Rehost or the Lift and Shift approach. Rehosting is a process of moving your applications from on-premises to cloud environments without modification. This strategy involves minimal risk and effort. It also reduces infrastructure and operating costs. This will benefit the organization in the long-term as it will encourage a cloud-first approach for the company and develop skills within the business.
AWS VM Import/Export, Racemi are few of the tools with which rehosting can be automated.
2. Re platform
Replatform or the Lift Tinker and Shift method which involves moving the applications as it is, with a small amount of up versioning. In this strategy, few optimizations are made before migrating to the cloud, like switching from self-hosted infrastructure to managed services and switching from commercial software to open source.
You may minimize the amount of time you spend managing database instances by migrating to a database-as-a-service platform like Amazon Relational Database Service (Amazon RDS), or migrating your application to a fully managed platform like Amazon Elastic Beanstalk.
3. Refactor
Refactor or rearchitect is a method of transforming non-cloud application into a cloud-native application. It calls for a complete overhaul of an application to adapt it to the cloud. Organizations looking to modify their applications and infrastructure from a monolithic architecture to a service-oriented (or server-less) architecture can use this strategy to boost agility or improve business continuity and maximize operational cost efficiency in the cloud.
4. Retire
While migrating a project to the cloud you might identify applications that are redundant and closing them down can save you on costs. The savings will ultimately enhance the business case, direct your team’s scarce attention to the things that people use, and lower the surface area you must secure.
5. Retain
When a business has highly invested in on-premise applications, or currently has active development projects, or have applications that require high performance, existing applications are working well, organizations that need to comply with strict regulations where the data is on-premise, in such conditions they should migrate when it is required too, otherwise retaining applications on-premise seems a better option.
AgilizTech cloud solution experts can offer a structured 5R migration strategy that can smoothly integrate with any kind of cloud deployment – be it public cloud, private cloud, hybrid cloud, or multi-cloud.
I hope this post has given you an understanding of what is 5R cloud migration strategy and you can come to a decision on migrating to the cloud only after careful analysis. We are there to answer all your queries.
