What is Cloud Migration? | Benefits, Process & Types | Accenture (2024)

FAQs

What is Cloud Migration? | Benefits, Process & Types | Accenture? ›

Cloud migration is the process of moving a company's digital assets, services, databases, IT resources, and applications either partially, or wholly, into the cloud. Cloud migration is also about moving from one cloud to another.

Cloud migration is the process of moving applications and data from one location, often a company's private, on-site ("on-premises") servers to a public cloud provider's servers, but also between different clouds.

This data must be evaluated against the seven common migration strategies (7 Rs) for moving applications to the AWS Cloud. These strategies are refactor, replatform, repurchase, rehost, relocate, retain, and retire.

There are several mature, tested approaches to migrating workloads to the cloud. We'll follow the five approaches in Gartner's “5 Rs” cloud migration strategy model—rehost (lift and shift), refactor, replatform, rebuild and replace—with a special focus on the first three approaches.

There are five phases of an enterprise's cloud transformation journey: Plan, Review, Optimize, Modernize, and Measure. Each phase individually contributes to increasing agility and innovation and driving successful cloud adoption.

Once the decision has been made that cloud is the best option to solve the business challenges you face (and it may not be), there are three phases of moving to the cloud: planning, mid-shift, and go-live.

While clouds appear in infinite shapes and sizes, they fall into some basic forms. From his Essay of the Modifications of Clouds (1803), Luke Howard divided clouds into three categories: cirrus, cumulus, and stratus, plus a fourth special type, nimbus.

There are four main types of cloud computing: private clouds, public clouds, hybrid clouds, and multiclouds. There are also three main types of cloud computing services: Infrastructure-as-a-Service (IaaS), Platforms-as-a-Service (PaaS), and Software-as-a-Service (SaaS).

What is cloud migration roadmap? ›

A transparent cloud migration roadmap helps avoid additional expenses, technical issues, and compliance challenges during cloud migration. More importantly, it ensures that businesses reach the goals they aim to achieve.

Furthermore, you can complete a cloud migration by switching from one cloud computing provider to another. This migration approach is called a cloud-to-cloud migration. For example, you can switch from Google Cloud Platform (GCP) to either Microsoft Azure Cloud Services or Amazon Web Services (AWS), and vice versa.

Every cloud migration will be different, so each will need a clear migration strategy. The 6 Rs of cloud migration—re-host, re-platform, repurchase, retain, retire, and re-factor—can help you to determine clear paths for your migration.

The main three types of cloud computing are public cloud, private cloud, and hybrid cloud. Within these deployment models, there are four main services: infrastructure as a service (IaaS), platform as a service (PaaS), software as a service (SaaS), and serverless computing.

Amazon Web Services (AWS) adopted this model and extended it to the 6 R's: Re-host, Re-platform, Re-factor/Re-architect, Re-purchase, Retire and Retain.