Cloud migration is becoming a necessary part of modernization for businesses. It saves on cost, alleviates responsibility, it’s more secure and provides a variety of other benefits. But sometimes there are things that simply can’t be moved to the cloud. Older systems and processes have to be modernized before they can be moved, and sometimes there are legacy systems that simply won’t function in the cloud. Figuring out exceptions to cloud migration can be tricky.
The first thing to know is that you cannot move something that’s 30 years old into the cloud not without significantly updating it. The cloud has very specific standards that have to be maintained in order for their provided SLAs to be met. This would be akin to attempting to run a dial-up modem on a modern fiberoptics network. It’s just not going to work. The cloud keeps itself modern, to keep itself reliable, secure and operating at near 100% up time. If a system would take a significant amount of effort to modernize to migrate to the cloud, likely it’s time to look at the fundamental use cases of the system and look at replacement or modernization for general stability and security, cloud or no cloud.
Another thing you should not do is simply lift and shift what you have built straight into the cloud. Part of the way the cloud becomes cheaper is by utilizing the shared responsibility services can provide, so if you’re not going to take advantage of cloud solutions, it’s not going to save you money. If you are going to put a server on the cloud and you start trying to store pictures on that server and keep building up the hard drive size of that server, it’s probably going to be more expensive than putting pictures on a server with a big hard drive in your data center. But it’s going to be cheaper to put those photos in an a cloud storage service like an S3 bucket, which is also 99.99999% durable. This means that any time you put something in an S3 bucket, it would have been duplicated multiple times, and multiple things inside your cloud service provider would have to break in order for you to lose that photo, it’s 99.99999% guaranteed.
The best advice for cloud migration is ensuring that you use it the cloud in the ways it’s been designed. If you lift and shift systems and processes, or try to put old things you’ve built into the cloud as they are, it might work, but it won’t work well. It’s not going to save you money and it’s likely to make you more vulnerable to failue and breach.
Having the mindset that you just need to keep up with the Jones and migrate to the cloud because everyone else is, is the fastest way to make costly mistakes. You should have the mentality that we should go to the cloud to reap it’s benefits, but you should be looking at that through the lens of we must modernize to migrate. Because failing to modernize before you migrate can end up with turning benefits upside down. Your monthly tech budget could balloon, you can wind up less secure, and you can add in new problems and fragility.
Cloud migration is important to the success of your business. It makes you more efficient, more secure, and costs less. But before you simply move everything to the cloud, you need to hire an expert to at least help you understand what can be moved as is, what needs to be modernized, and what services you should be using to gain the most out of your cloud experience.