How to build an effective cloud migration strategy

A cloud migration strategy is a comprehensive plan that outlines how a business will move its infrastructure and data from legacy systems to a cloud-based architecture. 

Organizations now have more than 50% of their application workloads in the public cloud, according to Flexera, with more planning to make the shift. The opportunity to achieve greater scalability and superior performance at a fraction of the cost of legacy infrastructure is too attractive to ignore, especially as data volumes grow and regulations tighten. 

However, just because cloud migration is an increasingly common goal doesn’t make it a straightforward process, especially when you have data siloed across dozens of different systems and spreadsheets. That’s why having an application migration strategy is so invaluable. 

In this guide, we’ll talk through the different types of cloud migration, address some common challenges, and examine how to build your own strategy from the ground up.

Why having a strategy matters

A cloud migration strategy offers benefits to every stakeholder, team, and individual within your organization: 

• For CIOs, it makes it easier to shift to the cloud and remain fully aligned with business objectives. 
• For IT leaders, it ensures the migration brings minimal disruption to existing services. 
• For data governance teams, it preserves compliance and security during migration. 
• For finance executives, it supports clear budgeting and cost optimization. 
• For teams, it provides clarity and reduces confusion during the transition. 

To elaborate, here’s a table summing up how a well-planned strategy can make all the difference versus going in without a clear plan.

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‍Types of cloud migration strategies (the ‘Rs’)

Cloud migration typically involves one or more of the following strategies: rehosting, replatforming, refactoring, repurchasing, retiring, and retaining. You’ll often hear this referred to as the ‘6 Rs of cloud migration’. 

1. Rehosting

Often known as ‘lift and shift’, this approach involves moving applications to the cloud while making little to no changes to the systems and their core functions.

‍2. Replatforming

Also known as ‘lift, tinker, and shift’, replatforming involves moving applications to the cloud while making minor changes to help the systems leverage cloud capabilities. 

‍3. Refactoring/rearchitecting

This is the most comprehensive of all migration strategies. It involves rewriting applications fully so they’re completely optimized for the cloud. 

‍4. Repurchasing

Sometimes called ‘drop and shop’, this involves saying goodbye to your existing legacy application and switching over to a SaaS solution, rather than manually migrating the application. 

5. Retiring

If you come across unused applications that are no longer needed, it may be simpler to retire the system rather than going through the effort to modernize it. 

6.  Retaining

If you have a solution that should remain in an on-premises data center due to technical or compliance requirements, you can choose to retain it. Some applications are better left alone, and there’s nothing wrong with opting for a hybrid cloud approach if it provides long-term value for the business. 

‍Recommended article: Key considerations for a successful legacy data migration.

When to use each strategy

Which strategy is the right choice for your business? Here’s a table outlining when you should (and shouldn’t) use each of the 6 Rs for your applications and workloads:

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How to build your cloud migration strategy in 7 steps

Let’s get into the nuts and bolts. Here are the seven steps we recommend to build a cloud migration strategy from the ground up:

1. Assess your current environment
2. Take stock of your goals
3. Decide on your migration strategy
4. Build your roadmap
5. Consider governance, compliance, and risk
6. Start the migration process
7. Optimize and monitor post-migration

‍1. Assess your current environment

Every successful cloud migration strategy starts with a rock-solid understanding of your current environment. 

Start by taking an inventory of the data and applications that your organization currently uses. Next, examine how they interact with each other and whether any interdependencies or bottlenecks exist that could pose a problem. 

This stage will also give you a clear picture of your cloud server requirements based on the resources you’ll need. 

‍Tip: Use data discovery and classification tools to automate the process of unifying your siloed data, which will save time, maintain security, and reduce manual errors. 

‍2. Take stock of your goals

What are you hoping to achieve with your strategy? For example, you might want to:

• Reduce costs by cutting legacy infrastructure and optimizing resource usage. 
• Improve agility through faster deployment cycles.
• Enhance security with built-in cloud compliance and centralized access controls. 
• Accelerate innovation with holistic access to data and AI-driven cloud analytics.

Your goals will directly influence the type of migration strategy you use. For instance, if reducing costs is your primary goal, you may want to prioritize rehosting and repurchasing to migrate quickly from legacy systems. On the flipside, if you’re looking to innovate and set your business up for long-term growth, refactoring may be a better option. 

Clear goals also equal clear KPIs. Establishing quantifiable metrics will help you measure progress toward your objectives and make informed decisions through the migration process. 

‍3. Decide on your migration strategy

You can now use the information from the previous two steps to decide on one or more cloud migration strategies for each of your workloads and applications. 

For example, let’s say you identify that your CRM solution is business-critical and tightly integrated with the rest of your tech stack. Based on your long-term goals, you may decide to allocate more resources to migrating this platform by rearchitecting it. Then you could leverage cloud analytics to the fullest and minimize bottlenecks and conflicts. 

For each of the apps and systems you intend to migrate, assess their importance, interdependencies, and complexity to apply the right migration approach to each workload. 

4.  Build a roadmap

You’re now in the ideal position to build a detailed roadmap for implementation. This should outline how and when each of your workloads and applications will move to the cloud. Here are some things to account for:

• Milestones and timelines for different migrations
• A plan for how you’ll allocate resources at each key time
• Fallback strategies 
• Testing checkpoints for performance and security
• Roles and responsibilities at each stage

A good starting point is to prioritize each of your migrations based on their importance, complexity, and business impact. High-priority items may need to be migrated first to maintain continuity and prevent bottlenecks, whereas less important workloads can follow in later phases. 

Remember that it’s a bad idea to migrate everything at once. Take it slow, migrate the big-ticket items first, and have a fallback in case things don’t go according to plan. 

‍5. Consider governance, compliance, and risk

It’s essential to address governance, compliance, and risk management before you start the migration process. You don’t want to put yourself at risk of a breach moments after going live due to an overlooked procedure. 

Set up clear data governance policies for the use of your cloud resources. This should include things like security measures, compliance requirements, access controls, and data management procedures. Think of it as a set of guardrails for anyone who starts to use the new tech. 

Tip: Plan for data backup and recovery. Data is most at risk when it’s in transit, so it’s essential to have encrypted transfer protocols and backup solutions ready in case something goes wrong.

‍6. Start the migration process

You’re now ready to begin migrating. Remember to do this in stages, including fallbacks, testing phases, and validation checkpoints along the way. 

It may be helpful to start with a low-risk workload to test your process and ensure the migration goes as expected. This pilot phase can help you identify gaps and refine your approach before you scale up critical systems. 

Once you begin the migration process, remember to test data security. You should also collect feedback from your teams and stakeholders so you can address issues early. 

7. Optimize and monitor post-migration

Once the cloud migration process is underway, track your success against your KPIs. These benchmarks will indicate whether your migration is going as expected. It can also help you make challenging decisions between cost and performance where needed. 

The cloud migration process isn’t finished just because your data is transferred. You need to gather and review data to guide further optimizations. This might include:

• Getting feedback from teams
• Reviewing cloud usage data
• Gathering insights from customers
• Monitoring application performance

All of these things will help you fine-tune your cloud environment and ensure your setup evolves as your business does. 

Common cloud migration challenges and how to avoid them

Cloud migration isn’t without its pitfalls. However, the good news is that you can avoid them with proactive planning. Here are six challenges and ways to mitigate them with your strategy.

How to measure success

Your cloud migration strategy isn’t a set-it-and-forget-it process. You need to keep track of KPIs during and after the migration to ensure you’re on the right path.

What metrics should I track? 

The exact metrics you’ll need to track will depend on your migration goals, but here are some ideas to consider: 

• Cost savings: How much money are you saving? Track your new cloud spend against the budgets you set out and the previous ongoing costs of your legacy systems.  
• Security incidents: Is your new system supporting risk mitigation? Monitor breaches, compliance violations, and unauthorized access issues compared with your old systems.
• Performance: Is your new system performing as it should? Measure uptime and response times compared with pre-migration times.
• Cloud adoption: Are your teams and end-users adopting the solution and viewing it as the new norm? Collect feedback and track satisfaction to determine the effectiveness of the transition.
• Productivity: Is your new cloud solution benefiting productivity? For instance, if you migrate your CRM solution, are your teams able to close deals faster? 

What tools can I use to measure progress? 

Struggling to measure success? Here are some platforms that can help you track your cloud environment’s performance.

• Cloud provider dashboards like AWS, Microsoft Azure, and Google Cloud have built-in dashboards that give you views of performance, uptime, and security. These are great for ongoing monitoring without having to set everything up manually. 
• Cost management platforms like AWS Cost Explorer and Azure Cost Management can help you track spending in detail and alert you to unexpected costs, helping you optimize resource usage. 
• Cloud governance platforms like RecordPoint offer powerful data governance capabilities, helping you unify your data, monitor access, and protect sensitive information while ensuring compliance with industry regulations. 

How RecordPoint can help

The key to successful cloud migration planning is preparation and well-planned execution. At RecordPoint, we can help with both. 

RecordPoint gives you all of the tools you need to unify your data, understand and prioritize every ounce of information you posse\ss, and migrate from legacy to cloud with confidence. Here are just some of the ways we can help:

1. Data knowledge: RecordPoint automatically discovers, classifies, and consolidates information across silos, without you having to move data from its original location.
2. Governance: Our platform automates your data governance with built-in compliance controls, ensuring you keep data secure and reduce risk at every stage of migration. 
3. Migration: RecordPoint helps you identify the data that needs to be migrated and ensure it’s prepared and protected for a risk-free transfer. 

As our platform seamlessly syncs with more than 1,000 applications, you’ll always be able to monitor your data in situ once you’ve made the switch.

Recommended article: Learn more about our data migration solution here. 

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Real-world insight: Dumfries and Galloway Council’s migration journey

Dumfries and Galloway, one of Scotland’s largest regions, chose RecordPoint to support its cloud migration goals. To help with data governance struggles, the council needed a solution that could unify its data, ensure compliance, and future-proof business growth. 

RecordPoint helped the Dumfries and Galloway Council simplify its digital transformation with automated data management, data security, and compliance. As a result, the council gained greater control of its information and maintained compliance throughout its migration, enabling a secure transition to the cloud. 

‍"RecordPoint provided the Council with the only compliance platform that met our current needs today and will meet our future cloud transformation goals."

— Lindsay Turpie, Records and Information Management Officer

Can RecordPoint help you?

A cloud migration plan is indispensable if you want to make the switch to the cloud without introducing risks, hampering your productivity, and spending cash you’d rather save. 

The good news is that, with careful preparation, you can avoid all the common pitfalls. Understand your data, decide on the ideal migration methods, map everything out with clear policies and timelines, and you’ll have everything you need for a secure migration that keeps your business running and costs under control. 

Ready to simplify the process of migrating to the cloud? RecordPoint can unify your data, ensure it’s compliant, and automate the migration workflow so you can focus on experiencing the benefits of the cloud. Book a demo today to learn more.