{"id":4190,"date":"2019-07-02T05:29:24","date_gmt":"2019-07-02T05:29:24","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/209.235.70.100\/?p=4190"},"modified":"2020-01-04T05:30:06","modified_gmt":"2020-01-04T05:30:06","slug":"migration-to-the-cloud-its-not-just-where-youre-goingits-how-you-get-there","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.navisite.com\/blog\/migration-to-the-cloud-its-not-just-where-youre-goingits-how-you-get-there\/","title":{"rendered":"Migration to the Cloud\u2014It’s Not Just Where You’re Going\u2026It’s How You Get There"},"content":{"rendered":"\n

Discussions of the cloud tend to focus on the benefits that can be achieved once you get there\u2014the cost savings, flexibility and innovation that are possible when you are no longer wrestling with the challenges of managing your IT on your premises.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

But as with many things in life, the journey is as important as the destination. If where you are going is important, how you get there is just as critical.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

When the cloud first came on the scene, most migrations were to software-as-a-service (SaaS)-based solutions such as Salesforce (SaaS still accounts for the largest part of the cloud market.) And while transitioning from traditional on-premises software to a hosted SaaS application requires a lot of planning around business issues (user roles, licensing\/subscription costs, SLA requirements, customization), it demands less in the way of technology changes, because most of the nuts-and-bolts work is handled by the SaaS provider.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Cloud migration strategies are really just now coming into their own with the growing popularity of Infrastructure as a service (IaaS) and Platform as a service (PaaS). As it became possible to decommission data centers and have an IT infrastructure delivered via public clouds, private clouds, hybrid clouds or multiple clouds, people naturally began to look at different ways of getting there.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

That’s why migration strategies are getting much more attention as more organizations shift existing IT workloads and legacy apps to the cloud.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

That’s the focus of a Navisite white paper<\/a>, Migrating to Azure: Choosing Between Cloud-Native, Cloud Ready and Lift-and-Shift Strategies. <\/em>You can download the white paper here<\/strong><\/a>.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

The white paper looks at the pros and cons of various migration \u2013going totally cloud native, lift-and-shift of existing applications or refactoring\/replatforming.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

It also includes insights from a major cloud migration Navisite completed for a global insurance brokerage. The migration was technically challenging\u2014more than 100 virtual servers and some 50 terabytes of data were migrated to Azure\u2014and highly successful: a project slated to take months was completed in just four weeks.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

At the conclusion of the project, both the Navisite and client teams reviewed some of the big lessons learned. Interestingly, while technical challenges were front and center during the migration, in the end, many of the big takeaways were related to the business practices that contributed to the successful outcome:<\/p>\n\n\n\n