Moving to the cloud is one of the most consequential decisions an IT organization makes. A successful cloud migration strategy sets the foundation for how your business scales, innovates, and competes. But too often, cloud migration initiatives stall, underperform, or force organizations to repatriate applications back on-premises because the groundwork wasn’t laid correctly.
The difference between a migration that delivers and one that disappoints comes down to preparation, visibility, and the right data at every stage of the migration process. These eight best practices provide a framework for planning, executing, and optimizing your cloud migration, whether you’re moving to AWS, Microsoft Azure, Google Cloud Platform, or a hybrid cloud environment.
Why your cloud migration needs a data foundation
Even successful cloud migration strategies are plagued by the challenges of unraveling complex, intertwined applications, and an overall lack of visibility into the original computing environment. Not to mention endless discussions around cloud costs.
By creating a baseline before your initiative and then comparing it with the same metrics captured after the transition, you have an insurance policy to understand and mitigate your risk. You’ll also have clear parameters to assess if your cloud deployment was a success.
1. Plan your cloud migration
A strong cloud migration plan starts with understanding what you have. Machine data gives you a comprehensive inventory of your servers, applications, and supporting technologies. It shows you the connections between microservices, applications, and users, letting you correlate and visualize key metrics with custom dashboards for full-stack visibility.
This detail feeds directly into your cloud migration planning, helping you assess the true scale of the effort ahead. Domain-specific machine data analytics generate meaningful metrics and thresholds to evaluate once the migration is complete, confirming the initiative is meeting its objectives and that nothing has been missed.
Pay attention to the data your environment generates daily. It contains the clues you need to build a realistic migration plan, one that accounts for dependencies, risks, and the complexity of your current cloud infrastructure.
2. Monitor application performance
Monitoring low-level resources, such as CPU, disk, network, and storage, provides insight into the health of your base system. But it doesn’t tell you about your application’s responsiveness or error state. You need both.
Gather and review application performance data in your current infrastructure configuration before the migration begins. Then compare it with what you see once workloads have moved to your cloud environment. Combining system-level resource monitoring with application performance monitoring lets you quickly identify over- or under-provisioning in your new environment, and course-correct before issues reach users.
This visibility is just as critical in a hybrid cloud or multi-cloud environment, where workloads may be distributed across multiple cloud providers and performance baselines can vary significantly.
Read more in our Alaska Airlines case study and video.
3. Validate cloud security
Keeping applications and their data safe is a vital responsibility at all times. When migrating to the cloud, of all the things that can go wrong or be neglected, security is at the top of the list.
Machine data plays a significant role in securing your information-processing environment before, during, and after the move to the cloud. Specifically, its analytics and machine learning capabilities can quickly process large volumes of raw log data to pinpoint potential vulnerabilities. Learn more about artificial intelligence for log analytics in our guide.
The right insights surface existing security violations, such as phishing, exfiltration, denial of service, and gaps in coverage across your on-premises, public cloud, or hybrid cloud environment. Resolving these before you migrate means you’re not carrying security debt into your new cloud platform.
4. Assure compliance
No matter what industry you operate in, regulatory requirements are part of your cloud migration reality. Existing rules are constantly updated, and new ones are introduced regularly. Failing to meet these requirements has serious consequences, including potential civil and even criminal penalties.
Setting up machine data-driven compliance baselines before your migration begins is the most reliable way to demonstrate continuous compliance during the inevitable regulatory audits that follow. It gives you a documented record of your security posture before and after the move.
You should also evaluate which cloud vendor you work with for cloud migration services. Whether you move your infrastructure onto Amazon Web Services (AWS), Microsoft Azure, Google Cloud Platform or leverage a multi-cloud environment, you’ll want to make sure that you’re clear about any compliance requirements to avoid any confusion or frustration with your cloud provider in the future.
5. Establish crucial KPIs
There are plenty of key performance indicators (KPIs) to track as you make the journey from on-premises to cloud computing. You might be enticed by the prospect of slashing capital expenditures and replacing them with smaller, more predictable operational outlays. You might prioritize the scalability and flexibility that come with cloud capabilities.
Whatever the critical metric is for your company, the only way to know whether it’s truly living up to its advertised potential is to set up and regularly evaluate KPIs, whether they are technical or business-oriented indicators.
Ideally, these KPIs should be in place before the initiative. Otherwise, it’s impossible to know whether the cloud solution has improved or degraded the overall experience. KPIs can also guide the cost-effectiveness of the cloud computing initiative, helping you justify an expanded investment in an ongoing cloud migration.
6. Benchmark and optimize
Benchmarking is often dismissed as “paralysis by analysis”, hated by some, and admired by others. We sit in the camp of admirers. Population benchmarks enrich incident context and accelerate troubleshooting by serving as a symptom check that helps you assess the relative urgency of an error. Cloud-native features like benchmark context also help validate and prioritize anomalies detected from an entity’s past baselines.
7. Codify monitoring workflows
Machine data and streaming signals generated by your digital assets convey valuable contextual information about the behavior of your customers, stakeholders, and users. The ability to observe and act on this information, thanks to cloud technology, helps you gain the real-time insights you need to remain competitive.
With Sumo Logic, it’s easy to bring in data from other systems, tie it all together and provide a dashboard that gives you a holistic view of your business processes. By codifying monitoring workflows into declarative configuration files, you can share them amongst team members, treat them as code, edit, review, and version them. If you move forward with SAFe, agile, agile release chains, or something similar, you can speed up your time through the pipeline.
8. Ensure data portability and interoperability
Multi-cloud is the operational reality for most enterprises. Companies are running workloads across an average mix of three or more private and public cloud solutions, using cloud capabilities from multiple providers to optimize for cost, performance, and resilience.
If you’re planning a multi-cloud or hybrid cloud migration, data portability and interoperability need to be built into your cloud migration plan from the start. A universal data collection strategy ensures you can capture data and transform it into real-time analytics across your full cloud architecture, without relying on multiple disparate migration tools to achieve end-to-end visibility.
This is especially important as you evaluate cloud platforms and cloud providers. Lock-in at the data layer limits your ability to move workloads, adopt new cloud services, or respond to changing business requirements. Build for portability now, and your cloud environment stays flexible as your needs evolve.
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Want to learn more about using a data-driven approach to cloud migration? Download our whitepaper with a complete review of the eight best practices and quick tips to get started.
