What Is Cloud Migration? Its Benefits, Strategy, Challenges & Approach
Cloud migration is the method of migrating your data — like emails, databases, applications, and IT processes — to a cloud platform from an on-premises environment or from one cloud to another. A cloud migration generally relates to migration tool and data from old, legacy infrastructure, on-premises to cloud suite.
There are different types of cloud migration an organization can perform. Most often cloud migration is considered as the process to transfer complete platforms from the on-premises data Center to a public or private cloud.
And another cloud migration model cloud is when migrating complete data from one cloud vendor to another — also known as cloud-to-cloud migration.
There is another kind which is reverse cloud migration, where data need to be migrated off from the cloud, i.e., migrating data from the cloud to the local data center (on-premise). However, this one is quite less referred to as cloud migration, rather they been referred to as cloud backup for on-premises.
Cloud Migration Guide: What it is, Why it’s Needed & How to do it?
Want to know more about cloud migration? Then, read this complete beginner’s guide that provides in-depth knowledge about cloud migration and thinks you should know before moving the cloud.
Here, we will complete start from the basics, like what do you mean by cloud and take you all the way to cloud migration strategies, tools and services for successful accomplishment of cloud migration. Additionally, we will also demonstrate a perfect utility that provides both types of cloud migration; on-premises to cloud and cloud-to-cloud migration. So, without further ado, let’s get started with of guide.
- Introduction to Cloud
- Benefits of Cloud Migration
- Cloud Migration Strategy
- Challenges During Cloud Migration
- Best Cloud Migration Tool
- Final Words
A Brief Introduction to Cloud
The word “Cloud” in technology is often shorthand for ‘cloud computing’ – it refers to a group of computer applications running on the internet. This group of applications can be accessed on-demand or self-service.
With the cloud, data can be easily stored and accessible from anyplace, anytime in just a matter of time. Moreover, unlike on-premises, or local storage, storage facility can be increased or decreased in a few clicks.
In the above image, first we have enterprise infrastructure. This is typically where a lot of our compute workloads are bare metal, enterprise core systems, mainframe, on-premises data center. The middle one we have a private cloud over here, also on-premises, but cloud capabilities in full effect. And then we have public cloud, this is off-premises cloud capabilities.
Now, many of our enterprises are still struggling to get workloads off their enterprise infrastructure and on to the cloud. So, when we migrate enterprise workloads to private or public, we call that “migration”. And this is all about understanding enterprise workloads and their characteristics in terms of whether they should land on-premises cloud, or off-premises public cloud.
What are the Benefits of Cloud Migration?
At a basic level, the main goal or benefit of any cloud migration is for migrating their complete email suite data in the most powerful IT environment possible. It can be varied based on cost, performance, security, user-friendly application. For example, most of the organization switch to cloud from an on-premises environment for greater elasticity, efficiency, achieving the max results with the least expenditure, self-service provisioning, flexibility, and redundancy.
For ease of understanding, here, we will only focus on the target as the public cloud, though other cloud deployment models will also be having these benefits too. However, the general query of cloud migration comes from users that want to switch to the public cloud. Following are the 7 benefits of cloud migration:
- Scalability and Business Elasticity
- Cost Saving and Effectiveness
- Flexibility and Agility
- Reliability and Performance
- Security and Compliance
- Lesser Maintenance and Downtime
Best Cloud Migration Strategy
Migrating data to the cloud requires good planning and strategies. It includes choosing the right cloud platform, employee training, and successful data migration.
Though, there are many public cloud vendors are there the most demanding are of course Google and Microsoft cloud. They provide the best applications for their users and easy maintain. Moreover, most users already worked on their free email client, i.e., Gmail and MS Outlook for desktop. So, choosing among these two are the most recommended choices from experts.
Now, before proceeding with choosing the right migration technique, you should provide proper training to your employees. It helps them to easily continue the work once the new cloud suite is deployed completely.
Finally, the right data migration technique needs to be equipped for successful cloud migration. As not all migration technique provides 100% data migration. Choosing the right technique will help you to effortlessly migrate data to the cloud without any data loss.
Challenge Faced During Cloud Migration
Anticipating and analyzing issues during cloud migration is very crucial. Following are some of the challenges faced during cloud migration:
Cost Management — Apart from the cost of purchasing the cloud suite, the cost of data migration is also needed to be considered. There are many cloud migration tools and service providing companies out there, but only some of them provide 100% success. Moreover, some of the tools and services provides a limitation on the data that can be migrated using a license that cab increases the overall cost of the migration.
Complexity — If you are migrating from a different cloud suite, then you should know that no vendor provides an easy way out of their service. This makes migration quite complex. It restricts cloud migration tools and services providing companies to migrate complete data from the current suite to the new cloud platform.
Reskilling Employees – The most generally faced during cloud migration is reskilling of employees. Proper training needs to be provided to employees so that they can efficiently work on the new platform once deployed.
Downtime During Migration – Another common challenge during cloud migration is downtime. Most of the cloud migration tool and service providing companies requires no usage of accounts during the migration. Although it disrupts the working environment, it is necessary for errorless data migration.
Best Cloud Migration Tool & Service
Here, in this section, we are going to demonstrate on the best cloud migration tool available in the market. This tool solely focuses on the complete migration without disrupting the business. This tool provides multiple migration options. You can choose your desired source and destination platform and proceed with the migration. The tool is self-explanatory with a complete step-by-step working mechanism and also provides a helps section detailing each feature of the tool. Following are the type of migration this tool offers:
- Source: G Suite, Office 365, Exchange Server, Lotus Notes, Google Vault, Office 365 Archive
- Destination: G Suite, Office 365, Office 365 Archive
Download Tool For Windows:
Download Tool For Linux:
Working steps of cloud migration tool are:
1. After downloading is finished, launch the tool and go to the Activation tab to proceed with the activation process. You can choose to either activate the demo version or for Full version.
Note: The demo version of the tool provides you 2 complete licenses for unmetered data migration. You will avail all the features without any restriction.
2. Once activated, from the Migration Configuration section, select the migration Source and Destination platform.
3. After that scroll-down to the workload section to select the items to migrate from the current platform to the destination cloud platform. Also, set the date filter for each item to migrate data of a particular date-range only.
4. Now in the migration source tab, enter the admin id and other details as asked. From below, click on the Project Settings to know how to get the other details. Once all the details are entered, click on the Validate button to authenticate the source admin details.
5. Similarly in the destination tab, provides the details for the destination admin account and authenticate.
6. Now move on to the User tab to select the desired option for source and destination user account mapping. These options will help you to easily map source and destination user account for data migration. You can choose from:
- Fetch Users: If you have cloud as a source platform then the tool will automatically fetch all the user accounts and list them on the tool window. Then you can enter the emails of the respective destination account for mapping.
- Import Users: This option allows to import a CSV file into the tool containing the mapped list of source and destination user accounts. You can get the sample CSV file for mapping from the Download Template option.
7. After mapping is finished, finally, click on the Validate button for the authentication of the user account and then finally click on the Start Migration button to initiate cloud migration.
8. During the cloud migration, you can preview the on-going and completed migrations in the tool window. Once the complete migration of all users is finished, the tool will enable the Re-Run Migration option and Download Report option.
Re-Run Migration Option – This cloud migration tool provides 3 types of re-run migration options:
- Retry Failed: This option allows to migrate items that failed to migrate during the migration attempt.
- Re-Run Full: This option will migrate those items that got skipped during the previous migration attempt. In the next attempt, it will migrate all those skipped items without duplicates.
- Delta Migration: The best feature of this tool is its delta migration option. This option provides unlimited delta passes to migrate new data from an old platform that was received after completion of the migration. To migrate newly arrived data, you just need to click on “Delta Migration” and then select the user accounts and click on the Start button.
Migration Report: Once the migration is complete, the tool generates the report of the successful/unsuccessful migration data. The reports are generated in two forms:
- Summary Report: This report will contain a single file containing the success and failure count of each category of items for all users.
- Detailed Report: As the name suggests, this option will create zip file containing a separate report of each user. Each report contains the in-depth details of migrated items.
And That’ it! All the data has been successful migrated from your current platform to your new platform. Now you can easily access your new cloud suite to access your data and continue your business. This tool will not tamper with any of the data or emails while maintaining the data integrity and hierarchy of migrating items. Moreover, the tool will automatically convert the document formats of the source to the destination cloud supported document format without compromising the data stored.
Final Tips
In this guide, we have provided in-depth knowledge of what is cloud migration, the benefits, challenges, and the best cloud migration tool to perform effortless migration. You can follow the complete guide to understand which cloud platform is right for you and what you need to do before and after deploying the migration. Furthermore, you can contact Pcvita Support to know more about the cloud migration services or connect in case of any help required during the data migration via the demonstrated tool.
