#cloudmigrationautomation

As business enterprises pursue digital transformation to accelerate decision-making, improve processes and workflows, create superior customer experiences, and generate more revenue streams, the cloud can act as a catalyst. It can position the machine first approach and enable enterprises to automate their business processes and plug into humongous on-demand computing power at lower costs than legacy computing architectures. The cloud is a critical computing resource for enterprises to create disruptive models and achieve flexibility, affordability, and scalability.

Statistically, the spending on public cloud services is going to reach a whopping $397.5 billion (source: Cloudwards.net). Also, the cloud has the potential to generate revenues between $100 billion and $170 billion for healthcare companies by 2030 (Source: McKinsey). Maintained by service providers at remote data centers, cloud technology has become the cornerstone of digital transformation for enterprises. It is a no brainer that to remain competitive, businesses have to migrate to the cloud along with their legacy systems. Joining a cloud migration platform entails taking a number of strategic steps as mentioned below:   

5 steps businesses should take to achieve a successful cloud migration

The key steps that are critical to achieving a successful cloud application migration solution are as follows:

1. Create a goals-based cloud migration strategy: Enterprises are willing to develop cloud strategies based on their future needs and current IT infrastructure and capabilities. However, the competitive environment of today won’t allow enterprises that are smug and caught in inertia to survive. They need to make a cloud migration readiness assessment to understand their competitive position, determine their migration goals, and analyze their strengths and weaknesses. For instance, they must decide whether they want to achieve business agility, bolster security to mitigate risks, reduce reliance on legacy systems, convert CapEx to OpEx, or switch to a DevOps approach.

Nevertheless, before choosing one or more of the above options, businesses should ensure their strategy is business-focused and developed in collaboration with the real stakeholders. Importantly, the outcomes for cloud migration testing and the way they should be measured must be established beforehand. To plan a robust cloud migration testing approach, businesses should engage the services of experts to help them sift through priorities and include critical things.

2. Calculate the total cost of migration: Moving away from legacy systems into unknown territory can be fraught with risks. So, while devising any cloud migration solutions, businesses should identify the risk factors and address them upfront. Remember, transitioning to a cloud-based operating environment can be costlier than anticipated. It may even transpire that after making any cloud migration risk assessment, businesses may find it difficult or not worthwhile to migrate certain workloads to the cloud. This can happen after making substantial investments in setting up the hardware infrastructure and obtaining software licensing. Besides, legacy applications may require reconfiguring or refactoring before being migrated to the cloud.

Also, the new cloud-based processes may require the hiring of additional staff. To determine the total cost of migration, businesses need to break it down into individual elements, such as network bandwidth costs, data center operating costs, and disaster recovery costs, among others. Use tools to create price estimates for cloud configuration. But in all this, consider the compelling reasons for cloud migration, namely, geographic distribution, remote access, agility, and scalability, before justifying the costs.

3. Determine the things to be migrated: At the outset, it must be understood that not everything that comes under the IT infrastructure or management can be migrated. This is in spite of the phenomenal expansion of cloud architecture. So, businesses should prepare an inventory of applications, processes, and data and assess their viability for cloud migration. For instance, there is no point in moving non-essential and/or non-standardized applications that are not compatible with the cloud environment. There should be a careful examination of every legacy system and its capabilities to determine if they need to be migrated to the cloud. It should be ascertained whether the assets are going to deliver the benefits that were envisioned for cloud migration.

4. Select the right cloud configuration: After determining the applications and databases to be migrated to the cloud, businesses should choose the right cloud configuration to achieve their goals. For instance, a hybrid cloud model using on-premises applications can yield optimum results for certain organizations. And each configuration may deliver distinct advantages related to control, uptime, security, and scale.

5. Include cloud migration automation: Cloud migration automation can reduce manual effort while also addressing skill gaps, productivity, and consumption. The automation efforts can involve core areas such as installing, patching code, and managing cloud services. By automating the migration effort, businesses can achieve minimal disruption during migration.  

Conclusion

Any successful cloud migration and operational readiness thereafter entails a robust cloud migration testing plan. It requires strategic planning, cultural transformation, and technical transition to realize the benefits of flexibility, agility, innovation, and scalability.

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James Daniel is a software Tech enthusiastic & works at Cigniti Technologies. I'm having a great understanding of today's software testing quality that yields strong results and always happy to create valuable content & share thoughts.

Cloud-based technology has made business enterprises realize how they can achieve the fruits of digital transformation and grow. From online classes and financial transactions to remote working, the cloud has truly brought about a revolution of sorts. According to Gartner, global cloud spending will likely exceed $482 billion in 2022, a significant increase from $313 billion in 2020. The growth has been fueled by technologies such as edge computing, Desktop as a Service (DaaS), and containerization.

As businesses limp back to normalcy in the pre-pandemic days, the cloud is going to be the principal technology to help them accelerate the transformation of their workflows. It is going to empower organizations to offer intelligent digital solutions that are agile, dependable, accessible, and adaptable. And with 5G on the anvil, the adoption of cloud is expected to reach unprecedented levels. For instance, by 2025, the world is likely to generate 3.5 times the amount of data that was generated in 2020 (44 zetabytes).

Growth in cloud adoption and challenges

Notwithstanding the recent advances in cloud adoption, a large number of enterprises are still relying on on-premise systems and are embracing hybrid solutions. The ubiquity of the cloud is such that enterprises are migrating to the cloud in droves to garner benefits such as unmatched accessibility, enhanced security, cost-efficiency, high scalability, elasticity, and possibilities for automation. But despite business enterprises racing to implement cloud solutions for their processes and workflows, there are a host of challenges as well.

These may include the cloud-based system dealing with data loss, downtime, security and compliance issues, technical feasibility assessment, and inadequate control and visibility. To mitigate such challenges, independent cloud testing services can validate every activity taking place in the value chain. The validation activity may include areas such as data, applications, and the overall IT infrastructure of the enterprise.

With enterprises going for digital transformation by leveraging the cloud, they expect greater control over their data and IT infrastructure. They seek all the benefits of cloud migration, such as infrastructure management, automation, scalability on demand, and flexibility. However, finding a single cloud-based solution that ticks all the boxes is not easy. So, instead of putting all their eggs in a single basket, enterprises can simultaneously embrace on-premises solutions while going through transformation.

In fact, they should embrace a hybrid cloud environment where they will have the choice to either transform in place or across any cloud combination. The success of any cloud-based digital transformation should be underpinned by cloud assurance. It can help enterprises and all stakeholders enjoy a harmonised experience across the cloud.

How can cloud assurance facilitate digital transformation?

Since cloud migration solutions can be fraught with risks, any cloud migration readiness assessment exercise should have the following pointers. These can help them meet the challenges and requirements of various stakeholders during and after cloud migration.

Cloud application testing ensures the data center, applications, and infrastructure are free of issues or vulnerabilities. Also, it vets their compliance with established industry and regulatory protocols.

Cloud migration testing helps businesses uphold quality specifications during cloud migration. Also, in cases of modernizing projects and data center transformation, QA testing can assist in improving the scope, visibility, and compliance of testing the components, applications, and infrastructure.

A cloud migration testing approach can help enterprises predict costs, accelerate time to market, and foster efficiency in a cloud migration automation exercise.

Cloud assurance finds out whether the system has achieved a compliant state from a corporate and regulatory standpoint. Further, testing keeps the cloud-based system compliant as and when changes are introduced. In doing this, the QA team analyzes the changes, especially related to risk derivation, requirement creation, test creation, and execution in a real test environment.

Cloud-based QA environments can help enterprises provision or de-provision virtual machines on demand. This can reduce the provisioning time significantly and allow enterprises to focus on core areas.

The maintenance of any cloud-based systems is of prime importance and may include tasks to be performed during cloud assurance. These are impact assessments, vendor release management, execution of tests for core releases, reporting and analysis, and updation of validated documents, among others.

Conclusion 

Digital transformation is the new paradigm that business enterprises across domains are willing to embrace, especially given their bitter-sweet experiences in the last two years of the pandemic. And the cloud is the most important technology to enable this transformation, provided the quality of each component therein is assured. So, any testing of the cloud migration platform should encompass every phase of migration right from the start.

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James Daniel is a software Tech enthusiastic & works at Cigniti Technologies. I'm having a great understanding of today's software testing quality that yields strong results and always happy to create valuable content & share thoughts.