What does migrating to private cloud involve?
Migrating to private cloud is an important transition that needs careful planning. The starting point can vary, whether that is your own on-premise infrastructure, another hosting provider or a different virtualisation platform such as VMware, but the process follows the same broad stages: assess your current environment, design the private cloud around your requirements, choose how data and applications will be moved, migrate in phases, and manage and optimise the platform once it is live.
How do you plan a migration to private cloud?
Before you begin, set out a clear strategy that takes account of your goals, the risks and how to reduce them, and your technical requirements. Key considerations include timelines, costs, data security, compliance requirements and potential downtime or integration challenges.
Start by assessing your existing environment and the dependencies between your applications, since each system has its own performance requirements and constraints. Key questions include:
- Which applications need to be moved?
- Are they ready to migrate directly to the private cloud, or will they need adjusting?
- Where should they be hosted?
- What infrastructure is needed?
Some applications can be moved as they are, an approach often called lift and shift, while others need changes first. The answers shape the design of the private cloud and the pathway for moving to it, which should balance performance, cost and risk.
How is the private cloud designed around your workloads?
A private cloud is designed around your workloads, with no fixed template to fit them into. Once you know what needs to move, architects choose the hardware, platform, network, resilience and security to match, so the environment is ready to receive your applications before the migration begins. Our insight on how a private cloud works covers the design process in more detail.
How is data moved: online or offline?
There are two main methods for moving data and applications to a private cloud.
Online migration
In an online migration, data and applications are transferred through a secure network connection. This suits small to medium workloads, and offers a fast, cost-effective route with minimal disruption, particularly when carried out in partnership with a hosting provider.
Offline migration
Offline migration involves physically transferring data and applications on encrypted portable storage devices. It is necessary for large volumes of data, when the network connection is unstable or unsecure, or when security or policy requirements prevent online transfers. It can take longer, but it gives a greater level of control and removes the risk of transmission errors or timeouts.
How do you keep disruption to a minimum?
A staged migration keeps live services running while the move takes place. Moving less critical environments first lets you validate the process before production follows, and cutover windows can be agreed in advance so that any interruption is planned for.
While a migration is in progress, parts of an application may run in both the old and new environments, so latency between them, data consistency and communication between components should be addressed during the design phase.
Spearhead AG, an insurance technology provider, took a staged approach when moving from a VMware private cloud to OpenShift. Its development platform and archival data were migrated over a weekend to validate the process, and its production environment followed in a single evening, minimising disruption to its live services. Read the case study.
What happens after the migration?
Once your workloads are running in the private cloud, ongoing management keeps the platform performing as intended. That includes monitoring performance, managing and optimising resources, and keeping security consistent, so the environment keeps pace with your needs as they change.
How can a provider support your migration?
Working with a reputable hosting provider to plan your strategy and oversee the migration is key to a successful move. Whether your provider manages the whole process or guides your team, expert engineers help ensure your configuration is optimised and that data integrity and security are maintained.
With our managed private cloud, our engineers work with you from the initial consultation and platform design, through a staged migration that prioritises your live sites and applications, to ongoing management.
The next steps
Migrating to private cloud goes best when it is planned around your applications, dependencies and risk appetite, and carried out in stages that keep your services running. Whether you are moving from on-premise infrastructure, another provider or another virtualisation platform, the same principles apply.
If you are planning a migration, speaking with an experienced managed hosting provider can help. Speak to one of our Cloud Consultants about your requirements, or explore our Cloud Migration Content Hub for more information.
