Assessing Your Current Infrastructure
Before beginning any cloud migration, conduct a thorough assessment of your existing systems. Identify dependencies, performance requirements, and compliance needs that will influence your migration strategy.
Choosing the Right Migration Strategy
The "6 Rs" of cloud migration provide a framework for your approach:
- Rehost: Lift and shift to the cloud
- Replatform: Minor optimizations during migration
- Refactor: Rebuild for cloud-native architecture
- Retire: Decommission unnecessary applications
- Retain: Keep on-premises for specific reasons
- Repurchase: Move to SaaS alternatives
Planning for Minimal Downtime
Implement blue-green deployments, database replication, and gradual traffic shifting to minimize business disruption during migration. Plan for rollback scenarios and conduct thorough testing in staging environments.
Security and Compliance Considerations
Cloud migration doesn't eliminate security responsibilities. Implement the shared responsibility model, configure proper IAM policies, and ensure data encryption both in transit and at rest.