Data On-premise to Cloud Migration:
A Step-by-Step Checklist for Success
Migrating from on-premise IT infrastructure to the cloud is one of the most impactful yet challenging technological endeavors an organization can undertake. Moving years’ worth of vital company data and critical applications off privately controlled servers onto a public cloud platform is no small feat. However, with careful planning and execution, this migration can allow businesses to truly unlock the myriad of much-touted benefits offered by the cloud — scalability, cost savings, flexibility, and more.
This comprehensive guide covers key practical steps technology decision-makers should include in their on-premise to cloud migration checklist to ensure a smooth and successful transition that aligns with their unique business needs.
The first phase of any migration project is gathering complete information on current IT systems and requirements. Without understanding what exists on-premise — including applications, data stores, server hardware, network architectures and more — mapping out a cloud transition strategy is virtually impossible. Teams should conduct full assessments of the following:
Document what data repositories, databases, software platforms and other solutions are currently running on local servers, along with metadata like volume, throughput, access frequency and more. This provides clarity on the scale of datasets and applications needing cloud migration services and solutions to be done.
Diagram the connections and interdependencies between applications and underlying databases or data lakes. Identifying integration touchpoints ensures related systems are migrated in sync to avoid disruption while clarifying the shift’s impact on downstream business processes relying on that data.
Profile essential workloads across metrics like computing power, memory, storage, network bandwidth, data ingress/egress speed and latency. This establishes appropriate cloud instance types, storage options and network configurations to procure in advance.
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With a clear picture of on-premise systems and requirements, the next major milestone is choosing the right cloud deployment model that aligns with the organization’s needs and preferences regarding control, flexibility and capital expenditure.
Public cloud providers like AWS, Azure and Google Cloud offer shared, multi-tenant infrastructure and platforms. This allows customers to avoid large upfront investments in owned data centers, making the public cloud ideal for businesses focused on agility and Opex spending.
A private cloud consists of dedicated single-tenant infra and platforms operated solely for one organization. This ensures greater customization, security and control—at a higher cost. Private clouds suit companies with strict governance needs and a sufficient capital expenditure budget.
Hybrid combines public and private cloud, allowing businesses to run sensitive workloads privately while leveraging public cloud benefits where possible. Though more complex to manage, hybrid enables the best of both worlds.
Further, decision-makers must choose between Infrastructure-as-a-Service (flexible but more hands-on), Platform-as-a-Service (more opinionated tooling and services) and Software-as-a-Service (fully prepackaged solutions requiring little configuration). Aligning to internal developer skill sets and application needs here is vital.
Choosing the right public cloud vendor is arguably the most crucial decision in this migration checklist. While the “big three” market leaders — AWS, Microsoft Azure, and Google Cloud Platform — offer many overlapping services, each has unique strengths and weaknesses to weigh based on the assessed application requirements and target infrastructure defined earlier.
With the most mature and extensive global cloud infrastructure offering, AWS suits most custom migration needs. The breadth of services, scalability and proven enterprise reliability makes AWS hard to beat for customized production workloads. However, all this reconfigurability means hands-on effort is still required.
Azure shines when it comes to tight integration with Windows, .NET applications, hybrid on-premise infrastructure and tooling like Power Platform, Dynamics 365 and Teams. Large Windows-centric enterprises benefit greatly from Azure’s specialized platform. Yet, it still lags behind AWS in some services.
Google’s cloud plays to its core data and AI strengths with unmatched analytics, machine learning, big data and containerization capabilities. For data-driven apps or ML engineering teams, GCP is likely the best fit. However, it does have fewer global regions than AWS and Azure presently.
Thoroughly testing applications on each major vendor’s free trial tier and investigating unique service support is time well invested here.
With the foundation set around deployment models, the chosen cloud provider, and resourcing requirements, the phases of actual application and data migration are next. IT leads should aim to minimize business disruption without compromising on thorough testing.
First, the core cloud network architecture spanning VPCs, subnets, network security groups, routing policies, restricted access roles and other cybersecurity controls should be established per internal governance standards. Additionally, essential migration and management utilities like data transfer tools, backup/recovery software, monitoring dashboards and automation tooling should be deployed early on.
The actual migration rollout must be orchestrated in multiple testing phases, arranged by the priority level of applications from non-critical to mission-critical. This ensures minimal downtime impact on key business processes while allowing iterative validation of successful configuration and performance in the cloud environment after each batch.
In perhaps the most crucial checkpoint, teams must rigorously test systems’ functionality, security and performance after migration to validate seamless operation as expected. Any stability, latency or compatibility issues must be swiftly addressed through cloud architecture adjustments or supplementary services/tooling.
Finally, after confirming successful data and application functionality through testing, traffic can be permanently redirected to the cloud platform, allowing the legacy on-premise hardware to be decommissioned. However, teams should have rollback contingency plans in place during this flip.
Migrating an enterprise from maintained servers to the public cloud is truly a multifaceted, long-term endeavor spanning people, processes and technologies. While the benefits make the effort worthwhile, meticulous planning and phased execution are critical for minimizing business disruption during this transition. Information technology leaders can leverage this comprehensive checklist, which covers critical assessment, cloud model selection, provider evaluation, staged migration, and cost optimization, to lead their organization’s data center exit successfully.
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