Data Migration to Cloud – Process & How Moving to Cloud Transforms Businesses

Reducing IT costs is one of the most common reasons why businesses embark on a cloud migration. The cloud may be a real haven for startups and small companies that don’t have the resources to buy expensive hardware. Thanks to cloud migrations, organizations collaborating with cloud providers can easily right-size computing resources according to their unique business needs and cut wasteful spending.

Cloud computing means using exactly the amount of cloud resources you need at any given moment. You can scale up when your business grows to meet business demands quickly. Also, when things don’t go as expected, you can instantly scale down.

Cloud migration is a way to ensure all stakeholders have access to necessary information and data. This in consequence is essential to maintaining business continuity, especially in an isolated remote work landscape. Also, you don’t need to wait weeks or months for hardware components and installations. You are flexible enough to get to market much more quickly.

The cloud enables collaborative work for teams, both in-house and traveling, as well as freelancers and remote employees. Also, moving data to the cloud is a great way to reduce downtime and makes maintaining availability much easier.

Moving data to the cloud environment provides more transparent data insights and analytics. You gain access to data-driven insights in seconds and on top of that, it’s extremely easy to share these insights and collaborate with the team. The cloud supports real-time analytics so you can react much faster to changing market conditions. This is especially crucial in industries such as FinTech and MedTech where real-time insights can drive competitive advantage. Many cloud providers, together with cloud-powered services, offer additional analytics tools and functionalities.

Cloud providers invest massive amounts in energy efficiency. Therefore, cloud migration reduces your company’s energy use and carbon footprint. Also, from the operational perspective, the cloud enables you to resume operations instantly in case of an unforeseen disaster. Restoring data from backups and getting your systems running again takes minutes.

Adopting cloud infrastructure and apps helps businesses seize new business opportunities and build the capacity to support rapid growth. Access to the latest versions of migration tools and applications means your team always benefits from technology innovation. That helps your organization collaborate and carry out tasks more efficiently and much faster. This, in consequence, leads to faster insights, quicker feature development, and more agile business.

Data safety and compliance risks can emanate from data breaches during the cloud migration or weak access control over sensitive company data. Therefore, businesses should carefully evaluate the security controls implemented by their cloud providers and ensure compliance with relevant industry standards and regulations. It is always a good option to encrypt the data, too.

When you migrate to the cloud, massive amounts of data are gathered, transferred, and stored. This may carry the risk of losing some data – it can be accidentally deleted by the third-party company or migrated without backing it up. In consequence, you may lose valuable information or programs. Therefore, to ensure a smooth and secure process, you should only collaborate with a trusted cloud service provider.

Before you start the cloud migration, you need to understand your current environment, and determine your cloud server requirements and security requirements. Also, planning for the size of the project is crucial e.g., for putting a realistic budget in place. You should conduct an advanced analysis of your source and target systems and then, prepare a flexible timeline for the migration project. Make sure all stakeholders are informed of your anticipated schedule and budget.

Data extraction can be done using a variety of methods from querying a database to directly reading a file. It’s a process of procuring data from a given source and moving it to a new context. The data you get will be replicated to a data warehouse or data lake for further reporting, analytics, or Machine Learning purposes.

Once the data is extracted, it probably needs to go through a format transformation process. This is usually done using multiple rules and algorithms. The goal of data preparation is to make it suitable for further processing and analysis. In most cases, data preparation includes collecting, cleaning, and labeling raw data into a format that is suitable for Machine Learning algorithms.

During this phase, the transformed data is loaded into a target system. Every workload element migrated should be proven to work in the new environment before migrating another element.

Testing is an incredibly important part of cloud migration. Once the data is migrated into a new target system, you should make sure it suits the new location and that it is stored securely.

Once the data is securely moved to the cloud environment, you should keep optimizing and monitoring it continuously. You should always look for ways to improve the performance and efficiency in the cloud. This may involve looking for opportunities to save costs or refining cloud operations. Don’t forget that the optimization process is ongoing, it never ends.