Navigating cloud to cloud migration: Top 7 best practices for a smooth transition

Business priorities and market demands are constantly evolving and changing. Organizations often find that their current cloud platform no longer meets their needs. Costly services, the need for better scalability, or limited functionality can prompt businesses to move to another provider. Cloud to cloud migration (C2C) can be a viable strategy to optimize costs, leverage advanced capabilities, and stay competitive.

Yet, compatibility issues and security risks often stand in the way of success. How to overcome these challenges? And what do you need to know for a smoother transition? In this article, our cloud experts break down the pros and cons, as well as best practices, to help you migrate confidently.

Top 6 reasons for C2C migration

Cloud to cloud transition means moving from private cloud to public, public to private, going multi-cloud, or building hybrid environments. Businesses choose to migrate and rethink their cloud strategies to keep up with shifting business demands and technology advancements. Here are the top reasons why organizations are migrating from one cloud platform to another:

1. Cost optimization: C2C migrations help optimize costs by leveraging another provider's pricing model or maximizing cloud usage. Thus, they choose cloud platforms that better suit their needs, such as pay-as-you-go or reserved instances.

2. Enhanced performance and scalability: Choosing a cloud platform that is more suitable for your workloads can improve the performance, scalability, and elasticity your business requires. This is particularly crucial for companies with growing workloads or those requiring high availability.

3. Flexibility and integration: Migrating to another cloud might provide better integration with your existing systems or third-party applications, improving interoperability and streamlining business processes.

4. Faster deployment: C2C migration can speed up deployment, especially if the target cloud provider offers automated provisioning or managed services that reduce deployment times.

5. Avoiding vendor lock-in: Moving from one cloud provider to another (or adopting a multi-cloud approach) allows companies to diversify, negotiate better terms, and maintain control over their infrastructure.

6. Regulatory or industry-specific changes: Shifts in compliance standards may require moving to a provider with suitable certifications or regional data centers that ensure adherence to local regulations.

What challenges can you face during the C2C transition?

While cloud to cloud migration offers numerous benefits, the transition process can pose challenges if managed improperly. Below are some of the most common hurdles businesses face when migrating:

• Complexity and compatibility issues: Cloud providers have different architectures, which can lead to compatibility issues. Applications and services must be rebuilt or reconfigured to function in the new cloud environment. Ongoing development and support for legacy systems can add to this complexity, increasing the time and effort required for a smooth transition.
• Downtime and data loss risks: One of the major concerns during cloud to cloud data migration is ensuring data integrity and minimizing downtime. Slow transfer speeds or unexpected interruptions can cause data loss or disrupt business operations if not properly managed.
• Cost and resource demands: Businesses can face unforeseen expenses during the migration. They include the need for specialized skills, application refactoring, or system outages.
• Security and compliance hurdles: Migrating between clouds may expose sensitive data to new risks as it moves across networks and temporary systems. Inconsistent security protocols and overlooked policies can lead to vulnerabilities, breaches, or compliance issues.
• Performance gaps: Migrating from a long-standing cloud provider can create performance gaps. Adapting to new tools and infrastructure often requires significant adjustments and thorough evaluation to ensure long-term success.

Top 7 best practices for cloud to cloud transition

Overcoming cloud to cloud migration challenges takes careful planning, the right tools, and expert guidance. Our leading cloud consultants shared these seven best practices to help you streamline your transition process:

1. Assess and plan carefully

A thorough assessment of your cloud environment is crucial before diving into the migration process. Understand your existing infrastructure, application dependencies, and potential risks that may arise during the migration. Define clear migration objectives, such as cost savings, scalability improvements, or enhanced performance.

Our cloud experts also recommend contacting a cloud consultant who is a partner of your chosen cloud provider or the provider directly. This will help you understand the terms and conditions for migration, explore available accelerators or consultancy services, and determine the specific requirements for leveraging these resources effectively. For example, AWS provides a clear Migration Acceleration Program (AWS MAP) to facilitate and support migrations.

2. Choose the right migration strategy

There are various approaches to cloud migration, and the most common method is to evaluate against the 7Rs. This includes:

• Lift-and-shift/Rehost: The strategy involves migrating applications and data to the new cloud with minimal changes. This is the quickest approach, which is ideal for moving workloads without significant transformation.
• Refactor: This approach means making some application modifications to better fit the new cloud environment. This is suitable if you want to optimize your apps for the new platform but retain most of the existing code.
• Replatform: This option includes moving applications with some optimizations but without complete redevelopment. It helps take advantage of cloud-native features like elasticity, without starting from scratch.
• Rebuild: This is a more time-consuming approach that involves starting from scratch and rebuilding applications to optimize them for the new environment. It can result in a better, more cost-efficient, and scalable solution in the long term.
• Retire: This approach involves decommissioning applications that are no longer needed or are being replaced by newer services.
• Retain: This strategy means keeping certain applications on their current platform if they continue to meet business needs and don't require migration.
• Repurchase: This involves replacing existing applications with cloud-based solutions, such as switching to a SaaS application, to reduce maintenance costs and improve scalability.

Your strategy choice depends on the complexity of your workloads, the organization's goals, and the specific advantages of your target cloud platform.

3. Select the proper toolkit

Leverage automation scripts and cloud-native migration tools to simplify the transfer process. Automation accelerates the migration and reduces the likelihood of human error. You can also utilize native transition tools from cloud service providers like AWS, Azure, and Google Cloud. Third-party solutions can also be used to streamline the process further.

4. Follow a cloud-agnostic approach

Adopt a cloud agnostic strategy when designing applications and infrastructure to ensure they can operate across any cloud provider. Though this approach is more resource-consuming and demands deeper expertise, it ensures your systems are standardized and interoperable. By going cloud agnostic, you will make future migrations between cloud environments easier and reduce the risk of vendor lock-in. While this strategy may involve higher initial costs, it helps avoid later platform-specific rework and leverage the unique features offered by multiple cloud providers.

5. Migrate gradually

When it's time to execute the cloud to cloud migration, begin by moving a small non-critical set of applications and data to identify issues before transferring your core workloads. It is also helpful to perform a pilot transfer first. The pilot will allow you to pinpoint potential problems, such as compatibility or performance concerns, without impacting essential operations.

At this stage, application observability should be expanded to cover legacy systems and the new cloud provider. This ensures that all required SLAs and SLOs are met and allows for real-time performance monitoring.

N-iX cloud experts also recommend scheduling the migration during off-hours to minimize disruptions. Additionally, implementing a backup and rollback plan can quickly revert to the previous state and reduce downtime.

6. Continuously test and validate

Though cloud providers do their best to ensure seamless integration, there can still be slight variations in how workloads run on different cloud platforms. Regular cloud assessment will help you spot and fix these issues during the migration process before they impact end users. Continuously validate data integrity to ensure that there has been no corruption or loss during the transfer. This will help you monitor the process and avoid data privacy issues.

7. Optimize and monitor

After the migration, ongoing optimization is key to maximizing your cloud investments. Track your cloud resource consumption and identify inefficiencies to maintain a cost-effective environment. Audit security protocols, performance, and costs to avoid issues leading to vendor lock-in or overprovisioning.

Partnering with cloud experts can simplify managing complex interdependencies. An experienced consultant can help you elaborate a cloud to cloud migration strategy according to your goals and guide you through all the stages of transition.

How N-iX can help?

Cloud to cloud migration is a transformative process that offers improved performance, cost optimization, and new capabilities. However, it requires a solid strategy and expertise to ensure success. An experienced cloud consultant, like N-iX, can help you streamline your transition and avoid major bottlenecks.

With 23 years of experience and a portfolio of 200+ completed cloud projects, N-iX demonstrates advanced expertise in cloud solutions. Our team of over 400 cloud professionals delivers comprehensive cloud services, including migrations between on-premises and the cloud or from one cloud environment to another, as well as efficient multi-cloud and hybrid setups management.

As an AWS Premier Tier Services Partner, Microsoft Solutions Partner, and Google Cloud Platform Partner, the company is recognized as a top expert in applying industry best practices to complete successful migrations. N-iX adheres to PCI DSS, ISO 27001, ISO 9001, and GDPR data security standards, ensuring quality and protection during transitions and cloud developments.

Ready to start your migration journey? Contact N-iX for a personalized consultation and discover how we can help you streamline your cloud transition.