When compared to on-premises solutions, cloud computing offers several advantages for businesses today, including lower IT costs, better IT efficiency, ease of use for remote workers, and faster deployment timelines. If you’re looking for a public cloud provider in 2020, you’ll have a lot of possibilities. Many public cloud providers are familiar to you, like Microsoft Azure, Amazon Web Services AWS, IBM Cloud, and the Google Cloud Platform. Your team can also pick and choose which cloud service provider is suitable for your company. We’ll go through Amazon Web Services’ best practices and how your team can benefit from cloud computing in 2020 in this post.

As the benefits of using the cloud become more apparent, more businesses are shifting their workloads to the cloud. The adoption of technology across all business verticals is the primary driver of this shift. With the introduction of technology, the amount of money spent on resources increases dramatically.

Initially, enterprises choose to host their infrastructure in their data center for a variety of reasons, including flexibility and security. With the expansion of the cloud, fast changing business demands, and expanding technology, more and more enterprises are opting for the cloud’s flexibility and agility rather than making upfront investments. Reduced operational costs, reduced hardware refresh costs, business agility, and adopted service model rather than building things from the ground up, and reduced operational risks are the key driving factors.

Cloud adoption, on the other hand, is not a simple process. If not adequately planned, migration of business legacy applications or rehosting infrastructure from the data center to the cloud can quickly go south. Even if they are successful, they may continue to operate in the same manner. To get the most out of the cloud, it’s critical to keep refining the infrastructure and adopting cloud design principles.

This Blog Post focuses on best practices that can aid enterprises in making a successful cloud migration.

AWS provides a comprehensive set of migration services and tools that can assist in identifying the best migration strategy for a business. With AWS, businesses can easily migrate their infrastructure and applications to the cloud, thus eliminating the need for on-premises hardware and software investments.

AWS Migration Hub is a service that provides a single location to monitor the progress of application migrations across multiple AWS and partner solutions. This service provides a way to track and manage migrations from start to finish, allowing businesses to stay on top of their migration progress.

AWS also offers the following migration strategies:

Rehosting (lift and shift): A quick and easy way to migrate applications to the cloud without modifying their architecture. AWS Server Migration Service (SMS) is a tool that automates the process of migrating on-premises virtual machines to the cloud.

Replatforming (lift, tinker, and shift): A technique that involves making minimal changes to the application architecture, such as moving databases to a managed database service provided by AWS to reduce operational overhead.

Repurchasing (drop and shop): A technique that involves completely replacing an existing product with a new one that better meets business needs, such as switching from one CMS platform to another or using a SaaS solution instead of developing a custom application.

Refactoring or Re-architecting: A technique that involves reworking the entire application architecture to better align with business needs and take advantage of cloud-native capabilities such as auto-scaling, elasticity, and containerization. AWS offers several services to help with this, including AWS Lambda and AWS Fargate.

Retiring: A technique that involves identifying and eliminating underutilized resources in preparation for migration. AWS provides tools such as AWS Cost Explorer to help identify underutilized resources and optimize costs.

Citrus Consulting has a team of experts who can help businesses identify the best migration strategy for their needs, and guide them through the entire migration process to ensure a smooth transition to the cloud.

Discovery and Component Elimination

AWS provides a variety of services that can help organizations in the discovery and component elimination phase of their cloud migration strategy. The AWS Application Discovery Service enables customers to gather information about their on-premises data center environment to identify the components that can be moved to the cloud. Additionally, AWS offers a range of managed database services, including Amazon RDS and Amazon Aurora, that can replace an organization’s current database system, reducing the actual cloud migration footprint.

For email services, AWS provides Amazon WorkMail, which enables customers to send and receive email using their own domain names. This service can replace an organization’s SMTP server, allowing them to take advantage of the scalability and reliability of the cloud.

Furthermore, AWS provides a variety of tools and resources to help organizations identify architecture components that can be replaced with cloud-based services, reducing the overall complexity of the migration. For instance, AWS Trusted Advisor can evaluate an organization’s AWS environment and provide recommendations for cost optimization, security, and performance improvement. AWS also offers the AWS Well-Architected Tool, which helps customers review and improve their workloads by providing best practices and architectural guidance.

AWS provides various services and solutions that can help organizations with license management and migration costs during cloud migration. For license management, AWS offers services such as Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (EC2) and Amazon Relational Database Service (RDS) that include license costs in the instance cost, making it easier for organizations to manage their licenses. Additionally, AWS also provides the option to use their own licensing for Windows servers, which can reduce licensing costs.

To help with migration costs, AWS offers several tools and services such as AWS Migration Hub and AWS Server Migration Service (SMS) that automate and simplify the migration process, reducing the need for expensive third-party migration tools. AWS also provides a Bring Your Own License (BYOL) model, which allows organizations to use their existing licenses in the cloud, thus minimizing the need for new licenses.

Furthermore, AWS provides a wide range of cloud-based services that can replace on-premises components, helping to reduce the cloud migration footprint and overall costs. For example, AWS offers Amazon Aurora, a managed database service that can replace the need for running a master-slave MySQL database system, and Amazon Simple Email Service (SES), a cloud-based email service that can replace running an SMTP server for delivering emails.

Overall, AWS provides a range of services and solutions that can help organizations with license management and migration costs, making it easier to migrate to the cloud while reducing costs and complexity.

Before beginning the migration, it’s a good idea to design the full cloud architecture and map the resources to their appropriate areas or subnets. The cloud allows you to create a virtual private cloud or network, as well as create subnets with the needed IP blocks, assign IP addresses to resources, and set up routing between them. In most cases, the legacy application components should have the same IP address for functionality continuity, as the components rely on the IP address for communication.

The resources are mapped to the same domain name for a seamless migration and switchover, and detailed communication is delivered to all stakeholders to minimize any confusion.

The success of an organization’s cloud migration journey is determined by the skill of its workforce. Whether in the cloud or in the data center, the team’s end goal remains the same: efficient resource management to keep applications up and running and meet business objectives.

It is, nevertheless, the voyage that is important. Because the cloud introduces abstraction and has different design principles than on-premises, it is critical to teach and develop this skill set across teams (operations, development, and design) so that they can swiftly adapt.

Training and developing this skill set takes time, so organizations may hire a new team with the necessary skills or hire a managed services provider with migration expertise who will have created a template and automation around the migration that can quickly address complexities and keep the plan on track.

Access management is a critical aspect of cloud migration. Enterprises need to ensure that their teams have the proper and minimal privileges to perform their tasks in the cloud environment. AWS offers a variety of services that can help with access management during the migration process.

AWS Identity and Access Management (IAM) is a service that enables you to manage access to AWS services and resources securely. With IAM, you can create and manage AWS users and groups and control their access to AWS resources. You can also use IAM to create roles and permissions for applications running on EC2 instances.

AWS Single Sign-On (SSO) is another service that can simplify access management for cloud applications. It enables users to sign in to multiple AWS accounts and third-party applications using a single set of credentials. With AWS SSO, you can centrally manage access to all your accounts and applications, and easily revoke access when needed.

AWS Organizations is a service that enables you to centrally manage and govern multiple AWS accounts. With AWS Organizations, you can create and manage accounts, apply policies to accounts, and automate account creation and management tasks. This service can help simplify access management by providing a central location for managing access policies and permissions across multiple accounts.

In addition, AWS provides a range of compliance and governance services that can help ensure that access management regulations are implemented. AWS Artifact provides on-demand access to AWS compliance reports and other documentation, while AWS Config enables you to assess, audit, and evaluate the configurations of your AWS resources.

By leveraging these AWS services, enterprises can simplify access management during cloud migration and ensure that their teams have the proper and minimal privileges to perform their tasks in the cloud environment.

It is always important to begin modest in order to ensure the success of the overall relocation process. Organizations should pick a small application, devise a migration strategy, and implement it. It assists them in identifying gaps and refining their master migration plan. This activity will also help technical workers become more familiar with cloud services, as well as transform stakeholders’ mindsets by helping them to see the benefits of cloud migration.

AWS provides several services that can help organizations identify repeated items and automate them as part of their cloud migration strategy. One such service is AWS CloudFormation, which enables you to model and provision AWS resources using code. This service helps you automate the deployment of infrastructure and applications, reducing migration time and ensuring consistency across teams.

Another service that can assist with automation is AWS Lambda, which is a serverless compute service that runs your code in response to events and automatically manages the underlying compute resources for you. This service can be used to automate repetitive tasks and processes during the migration, freeing up your team’s time to focus on other critical tasks.

Additionally, AWS offers Amazon EC2 Auto Scaling, which automatically scales your compute capacity based on demand. This service can be used to automatically scale applications during the migration process, ensuring that they can handle the increased traffic and load during the transition to the cloud.

Overall, AWS offers several services that can help automate repetitive tasks and streamline the migration process, allowing organizations to realize the full benefits of cloud computing.

AWS provides a wide range of services to assist organizations with monitoring and governance during the cloud migration process. AWS CloudTrail, for example, is a service that provides comprehensive audit logs of account activities in the AWS Management Console, SDKs, and APIs. AWS CloudWatch is another service that enables users to collect and monitor log data, set alarms, and visualize metrics. AWS Config enables you to record and evaluate resource configurations, making it easier to enforce compliance policies and enhance security. Additionally, AWS provides services for automated resource optimization and rightsizing, such as AWS Trusted Advisor and AWS Cost Explorer, which can help organizations reduce costs while still delivering the desired performance. By using these services, organizations can ensure that their cloud environment is closely monitored and properly governed, resulting in enhanced security, compliance, and cost-effectiveness.

To design, implement, and deliver a successful cloud migration strategy for your firm, you should start with a certified AWS Partner like Citrus Consulting. Citrus Consulting’s AWS Data Migration Service helps clients simplify workflow procedures, improve security and visibility across the entire system, reduce overhead in the software development life cycle, and provide game-changing flexibility when it comes to bringing new features to market. Citrus Consulting creates and implements roadmaps for clients to embrace a cloud computing environment, allowing them to save significant sums of money on their IT infrastructure budget.

To accomplish huge migrations, organizations should follow the agile methodology and work in sprints, as well as provide continuous learning and improvement during the migration process. The agile technique is applicable not just to enterprises, but also to MSPs and their partners. Organizations should enable their teams to swiftly share feedback on what’s working and what isn’t so that required adjustments can be made and everyone stays on track.