--- title: "What is cloud migration?" page_name: "Cloud migration" type: "glossary" slug: "cloud-migration" published_at: "2025-02-17" modified_at: "2026-02-26" url: "https://www.sumologic.com/glossary/cloud-migration" canonical: "https://www.sumologic.com/glossary/cloud-migration" markdown_url: "https://www.sumologic.com/glossary/cloud-migration.md" lang: "en" excerpt: "Learn what cloud migration is and why so many organizations are migrating to the cloud. Explore cloud migration strategies and advice to decide which apps to migrate first with a cloud migration checklist." --- [Glossary](/glossary)# Cloud migration [A](/glossary#A) [B](/glossary#B) [C](/glossary#C) [D](/glossary#D) [E](/glossary#E) [F](/glossary#F) [G](/glossary#G) [H](/glossary#H) [I](/glossary#I) [J](/glossary#J) [K](/glossary#K) [L](/glossary#L) [M](/glossary#M) [N](/glossary#N) [O](/glossary#O) [P](/glossary#P) [Q](/glossary#Q) [R](/glossary#R) [S](/glossary#S) [T](/glossary#T) [U](/glossary#U) [V](/glossary#V) [W](/glossary#W) [X](/glossary#X) [Y](/glossary#Y) [Z](/glossary#Z) ##### Table of contents ## What is cloud migration? **Cloud migration** is the process of moving applications, data, workloads, and other components from on-premises infrastructure to a **cloud-based environment**. This may include migrating systems to a **public cloud**, **private cloud**, or **hybrid cloud** architecture, depending on business and technical requirements. Leading **cloud providers** such as [Amazon Web Services (AWS)](https://www.sumologic.com/blog/data-storage-aws), [Microsoft Azure](https://www.sumologic.com/blog/azure-services-monitoring), and [Google Cloud Platform](https://www.sumologic.com/app-catalog/google-cloud-functions) offer scalable **cloud infrastructure**, compute, and **cloud storage**, along with native services for analytics, artificial intelligence, and application development. [Sumo Logic’s cloud-neutral platform integrates](https://www.sumologic.com/how-it-works/) seamlessly with major cloud platforms to support visibility, security, and operational insights throughout the **cloud migration process**. Key takeaways - Organizations have struggled with growing their information infrastructure, but moving to the cloud adds tangible value to their outlook. - The opposite of leaving apps in-house is making them portable, or ready to be ‘dragged and dropped’ into a cloud architecture and set straight to work. - Packaging older apps for portability involves a major reworking of the operating code, performed by highly-skilled software engineers who understand the legion of technical interactions taking place in a cloud environment. - Gartner’s 5R’s – Rehost, Refactor, Revise, Rebuild, and Replace – is a great starting point for deciding on a cloud migration strategy. ## Why migrate to the cloud? Organizations have traditionally been held back by the challenge of growing their information infrastructure. However, moving to the cloud adds tangible value to their outlook. Here are a few benefits: **Agility and speed** With the cloud, procurement of new inventory and storage space is reduced to a matter of days or even hours, giving businesses the agility to respond to a rapidly changing technological environment. **Operational efficiency** The simplicity of cloud solutions makes teams more productive. In distributed teams, the cloud removes region-specific dependencies, creating a collaborative team setting. **Security** Most popular cloud solutions have robust built-in cloud security programs. At Sumo Logic, we help optimize cloud security, providing [security analytics](https://www.sumologic.com/solutions/cloud-infrastructure-security) and [visibility](https://www.sumologic.com/solutions/cloud-monitoring/) across the entire cloud environment. **Bundled services** Cloud providers package several useful features, such as disaster recovery, automatic logging, monitoring,[ continuous deployment](https://www.sumologic.com/glossary/continuous-deployment), and others, as part of their solution. **Higher resource availability** The cloud environment comes with a no-downtime promise that increases the availability of resources, in turn leading to better asset utilization and customer satisfaction. **Cost savings** The pay-as-you-go cloud pricing model allows organizations to optimize usage, reduce capital expenditures, and better manage migration costs over time. ## Cloud migration strategies Gartner’s 5R’s – Rehost, Refactor, Revise, Rebuild, and Replace – is a great starting point for deciding on a [cloud migration](https://www.sumologic.com/glossary/cloud-migration) strategy. Here is a quick synopsis: **Rehost** Also called ‘lift and shift,’ Rehosting is the use of [Infrastructure-as-a-Service](https://www.sumologic.com/glossary/infrastructure-as-a-service) (IaaS). It’s about simply taking the existing data applications and redeploying them on the cloud servers. This works great for beginners, who are not yet accustomed to a cloud environment or for systems where code modifications are extremely difficult. **Refactor** Also called ‘lift, tinker, and shift,’ refactoring involves making some optimizations and changes for the cloud and employing a [Platform-as-a-Service](https://www.sumologic.com/glossary/paas) (PaaS) model. Applications keep their core architecture unchanged but use cloud-based frameworks and tools that allow developers to take advantage of the cloud’s potential. **Revise** Adding another layer atop the previous two, this approach involves making architectural and code changes before migrating to the cloud. The objective is to optimize the application to take complete advantage of the cloud services, introducing major changes to the code. Advanced knowledge is required to implement this strategy. **Rebuild** Similar to Revise in its big-bang approach, Rebuild discards the existing code base in favor of a new one. For example, moving from Java to .NET. This is a time-consuming process and is only used when there is consensus that the existing solution does not suit the changing business needs and needs a revamp. **Replace** Migrating to a third-party, vendor-based application from an existing native application is what this strategy is all about. The existing application data needs to be migrated to the new system, however, everything else will be new. ## Which apps to migrate and which to leave native? The first step is determining which applications (if any) make more sense in-house. Circumstances will vary, but these apps may include certain databases, applications for managing internal processes, or others with special sensitivity to your organization. The opposite of leaving apps in-house is making them portable, or ready to be ‘dragged and dropped’ into a cloud architecture and set straight to work. Portable apps present many administrative advantages such as easier disaster recovery, scaled capabilities for geographic cloud regions, faster turnaround for bringing versions to market and cost-leveraging new and existing providers. However, packaging older apps for portability involves a major reworking of the operating code, performed by highly-skilled software engineers who understand the legion of technical interactions in a cloud environment. The most common environment today is the [hybrid cloud](https://www.sumologic.com/glossary/hybrid-cloud), a combination of native and portable apps working together on a platform that blends private internal networks with cloud-hosted services like [Amazon’s AWS](https://www.sumologic.com/resources/amazon-web-services/). These environments represent traditional and new networking challenges but also leverage the power of the cloud and its services to expand existing infrastructures’ reach and interaction capabilities. Analyze carefully before undertaking the tricky path to cloud migration. This will save you endless frustration and costs and build a strong cloud foundation from which to grow. ## Individuals and interactions over processes and tools Below is a checklist of items that have extremely important ramifications for your cloud infrastructure today and on its future growth. **1. Choose the right cloud platform** How much raw storage will you need to host and properly back up your main databases? How much overhead will you need for hypervisors like those used in VMWare and Microsoft’s Azure environment? Build out the appropriate virtual workspace in advance and be selective when pricing cloud storage and hosting options. **2. Check for hardware obsolescence** Many existing network devices employ hardware acceleration to power through heavy traffic. Not all simulated devices—like virtual routers, switches, and load balancers—currently support hardware acceleration in the cloud. Audit your traffic and processor demands and trends before assuming virtual replacement devices will perform all the duties of existing native hardware. **3. Research licensing issues** Native networking environments of yesterday usually licensed software by the user, the device, or by the enterprise. But the cloud changes these variables, hosting apps on machines with adjustable virtual processor counts and adding the ability to scale application services and servers. Factoring this impact on your licensing model could save huge sums of money. **4. Mind your SSLs and certificates** Secure socket layer certificates operate with precision to verify data routes and security. Changing a host location can throw your SSLs off track. It’s best to review where and how you use SSLs and prepare to renew or replace them before going live from a new hybrid cloud environment. Companies like DigiCert offer insight tools to assess your SSL chain. **5. Audit IP addresses** IP addresses, usually statically or dynamically assigned and then forgotten about, take on another layer of challenge in the cloud. Old DHCP scopes and static addresses will likely change when moving to a cloud infrastructure, creating the need for a thorough IP address relationship audit prior to the move so that dependent sockets won’t be broken on migration. **6. Evaluate access control list dependencies** An access control list (ACL) regulates user and service activity across your network. As with IP addresses, migration will impact ACL dependencies. Customer traffic and system activities like backups, hypervisors, and monitoring will need to be reviewed for a shift to a full or hybrid cloud infrastructure to make sure everyone and everything can reach what it has to in the new design. ## Prepare for audit Advance planning and prep will make complying with audits much simpler. Consider all the interactions that must be logged, analyzed, and reacted to every time traffic hits your site. IP traffic history, user tracking data, [threat detection](https://www.sumologic.com/solutions/threat-detection-investigation), security intrusion attempts, anomalies, and more collide in terabytes of data. Anyone string in that data could have deep implications for your business. Understandably, correctly analyzing all this raw data can be intimidating. [Log analysis ](https://www.sumologic.com/glossary/log-analysis)of that much data requires assistance and software solutions that assist with or even guarantee compliance are often smart investments. ## Keep compliance in mind Not if, but when an event strikes your cloud environment, it is critical to run [root-cause analysis](https://www.sumologic.com/glossary/root-cause-analysis) and trace logs for culprit activity. It is an ever-evolving challenge, but a good compliance strategy addresses these requirements: **Centralized logging** All data interaction between all machines, virtual and physical, must be recorded and compiled into one or more highly secure locations. **Demonstrated immutability** Once collected, requirements dictate that data must be demonstrated to be immutable. Safety requirements include heavy encryption and a hard audit trail for the black box in which centralized logging data is locked. **Daily infrastructure reviews** A smart cloud model includes daily probes for threats and vulnerabilities. By simulating attacks, outages, and other crises, good teams can respond with agility or even prevent service interruption. **Clear and rigid data retention policies** Industry standards for keeping a full history of cloud activity vary from three months to 12 or more. It’s important to first define your policies, and then implement them. Inconsistencies between policy and procedure can lead to big compliance trouble fast, so data retention is a critical focus area for audit preparation. ## Cloud migration made easy with Sumo Logic Sumo Logic helps enterprises [accelerate their cloud strategy](https://www.sumologic.com/solutions/cloud-migration) by offering an automated, easy, and rapid development and deployment process for cloud-based applications. We have developed the first truly next-generation machine data analytics platform, delivered as a cloud-based service. Some of the features that our platform offers are: **[Continuous intelligence capabilities](https://www.sumologic.com/solutions/cloud-infrastructure-security)** with built-in advanced analytics help uncover patterns and anomalies. **Unified platform** for [logs and metrics](https://www.sumologic.com/solutions/log-management) with the ability to analyze data, perform root-cause analysis and [monitor apps](https://www.sumologic.com/solutions/application-monitoring) and [infrastructure](https://www.sumologic.com/solutions/infrastructure-monitoring) in real-time. **On-demand scaling** to support rapid growth and cloud migration thanks to a multi-tenant architecture. [**Security analytics and identification** ](https://www.sumologic.com/solutions/cloud-monitoring/)of any risks and threats within the cloud environment. ### FAQs How to measure the success of cloud migration?+Moving to the cloud is a major undertaking, whether you’re rehosting, replatforming or refactoring. To make sure that everything is working and that there is a categorical improvement from pre-migration, KPIs must be established. Here are several KPIs that operationalize cloud migration goals: - Both steady-state and peak server utilization, as expressed as a % of pre-migration levels. - Application availability levels (availability SLAs), as expressed as a % of pre-migration levels. - Comparison of new metrics versus documented benchmarks pre-migration. For applications that experience usage peaks and valleys, multiple and/or seasonal baselines must be documented and established to serve as benchmarks post-migration. Your cloud migration KPIs can be broken down into more specific metrics. But tracking metrics without establishing the [essential baseline metrics](https://www.sumologic.com/blog/cloud-migration-metrics-baseline) will lead you to make subjective assumptions. What are the benefits of using Sumo Logic for cloud migration?+Sumo Logic helps prevent typical pitfalls of cloud migration projects. Track optimal performance to recognize potential degradations, ensure you have full visibility, prevent downtime, and stay secure and compliant throughout your migration process. What are the best practices for a successful cloud migration strategy?+Even successful cloud migration strategies are plagued by the challenges of unraveling complex, intertwined applications and limited visibility into the original computing environment. All too often cloud computing initiatives don’t deliver the anticipated results. Sometimes the entire undertaking stalls or applications underperform in the cloud to the extent they must be “repatriated,” i.e., moved back on-prem. To support a successful shift from on-premises to cloud computing, here are[ eight cloud best practices for cloud migration](https://www.sumologic.com/blog/best-practices-for-cloud-migration-strategy) using a machine data aggregation and analytics platform to get you started: - Plan for the migration - Establish crucial KPIs - Monitor application performance - Validate security - Assure compliance - Benchmark and optimize - Codify monitoring workflows - Ensure data portability and interoperability [AI Instructions](https://www.sumologic.com/ai-instructions.md)