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What is Cloud migration?

Cloud migration is the process of moving an organization’s digital assets—such as applications, data, and IT workloads—from on‑premises data centers or existing environments into a cloud computing environment. It can also mean moving from one cloud provider to another, or combining cloud and on‑premises resources in a hybrid setup.

Basic idea

  • Cloud migration usually involves shifting servers, databases, storage, applications, and related services from physical data centers to public, private, or hybrid clouds.
  • The goal is typically to gain scalability, reduce hardware and operations costs, improve reliability, and access modern services like analytics or AI.

Common types

On‑premises to cloud

Moving workloads from your own data center into AWS, Azure, GCP, or similar.

Cloud‑to‑cloud

Moving from one provider to another (for example, Azure to AWS) for cost, performance, or compliance reasons.

Hybrid migration

Keeping some systems on‑premises while moving specific workloads to the cloud and integrating them.

Typical steps

Assessment

Analyze current applications, data, dependencies, and costs.

Planning

Decide which workloads to move, in what order, and which migration strategy (lift‑and‑shift, replatform, refactor, etc.).

Migration execution

Move data and applications, test, and cut over with minimal downtime.

Optimization

After migration, right‑size resources, improve performance, and enhance security and resilience.Managed Services Model

Managed Services Model

A managed services model in cloud is where a third‑party provider takes over part or all of the responsibility for running and operating your cloud environment on an ongoing basis, typically for a recurring fee. This lets your internal team focus more on business and product work instead of day‑to‑day infrastructure and platform operations.
  • In a managed services model, a provider handles continuous management of your cloud resources: monitoring, maintenance, updates, and issue resolution, rather than you managing everything directly.
  • This can cover public, private, or hybrid clouds, and is usually delivered as a subscription (“as‑a‑service”) with defined service levels and responsibilities.
  • Infrastructure and platform operations: provisioning, configuration, patching, performance tuning, and capacity/scale management.
  • Reliability and security: 24/7 monitoring, incident response, backups, disaster recovery, and security hardening/compliance tasks.
  • Cost and optimization: rightsizing resources, reducing waste, and advising on architecture to keep performance high and spend under control.
  • Customer typically owns: application logic, data ownership, access policies, and high‑level architecture decisions aligned to business goals.
  • Managed service provider owns: day‑to‑day cloud operations, tooling, automation, updates, and much of the operational runbook and support.
  • Reduces need for large in‑house ops teams and specialized cloud skills, which can lower operational overhead and hiring/training costs
  • Speeds up adoption of cloud, hybrid, or multi‑cloud architectures, while improving uptime and security posture through specialized expertise.

A managed cloud service provider (MCSP) is mainly responsible for running, securing, and optimizing your cloud environment on an ongoing basis. Responsibilities are usually defined in contracts/SLAs and can be grouped as below.

Operations and monitoring

  • 24/7 monitoring of infrastructure, platforms, and key applications, including alerts and incident handling.
  • Routine operations such as provisioning, configuration changes, patching OS/middleware, and managing backups and restores.

Reliability, backup, and DR

  • Implementing and maintaining backup policies, retention, and regular recovery testing.
  • Designing and operating high‑availability and disaster‑recovery setups (multi‑AZ/region, failover, RPO/RTO).

Security and compliance

  • Hardening cloud environments (network segmentation, IAM policies, encryption, patching).
  • Continuous security monitoring, vulnerability management, and support for compliance controls and audits (e.g., logging, evidence collection).

Cost and performance optimization

  • Rightsizing compute/storage, cleaning up unused resources, and advising on pricing models (reserved/spot, tiers).
  • Performance tuning of infrastructure and key managed services (databases, caches, load balancers).

Architecture and lifecycle management

  • Assisting with cloud architecture design, landing zones, standards, and reference patterns.
  • Managing change, releases, and environment lifecycle (dev/test/prod), often with automation and infrastructure‑as‑code.

Support and governance

  • Providing helpdesk/support for cloud issues with defined SLAs and escalation paths.
  • Reporting and governance: regular health checks, security and cost reports, and recommendations to align cloud usage with business goals.

Hybrid migration

Cloud migration offers major benefits in cost, agility, and resilience, but it also introduces planning, cost-control, and change‑management challenges that must be actively managed

Key benefits

  • Optimized costs: Reduces spend on physical servers, maintenance, and datacenter real estate, while enabling right‑sizing and pay‑as‑you‑go models.
  • Flexibility and scalability: Lets teams scale resources up or down on demand and run workloads closer to users for better performance.
  • Enhanced security: Provides built‑in platform security, specialized tools, and often automatic patching for infrastructure and services.
  • Compliance support: Offers specialized capabilities and certifications to help regulated sectors like healthcare, finance, and government meet compliance needs.
  • Backup, recovery, and failover: Delivers integrated backup and disaster recovery, including cross‑region storage for higher resilience
  • Simplified management: Central management tools make it easier to monitor and administeron‑premises and cloud resources from one place.

Common challenges

  • Planning complexity: Large‑scale migrations demand extensive cross‑organization planning across workloads, dependencies, and timelines.
  • Upfront and hidden costs: While long‑term ROI can be strong, organizations must account for planning, implementation, and potential refactoring costs.
  • Security and compliance responsibility: Providers supply tools and controls, but customers must design and implement the right security and compliance posture.
  • Business downtime risk: Moving large volumes of data quickly still requires careful coordination to minimize service disruption.
  • Skills and adoption: Teams often need new cloud skills and training, and organizations must manage cultural and process changes.
  • Partner and vendor selection: Choosing the right migration partners and cloud providers is critical and can be challenging for organizations with limited in‑house expertise.