The cloud is the land of opportunity for businesses seeking agility, scalability, and cost-efficiency. But navigating the migration process can be daunting.
We'll delve into two crucial areas: planning and assessment tools for a strategic migration and cost management and optimization tools to keep your cloud spending under control. We'll also explore cloud compliance tools to ensure security during the transition.
Whether you're migrating to AWS, Azure, or Google Cloud Platform (GCP), this guide empowers you to make informed decisions and leverage the right tools for your specific needs.
Using cloud migration tools will assist you with migrating and support you with the technical challenges that can arise with cloud migration.
Using the AWS Migration Hub, you simplify migration planning and tracking and give you visibility into your application portfolio. You can see the status of the servers and databases that you’re migrating to the cloud.
Using the Hub, you can track the migration statuses of other AWS tools, including the AWS Application Migration Service and AWS Database Migration Service. It also provides migration templates to simplify your migration.
Unify your migration and modernization with Azure Migrate. Before beginning your migration, it assesses your on-premises resources. Then, it uses technical and business insights to plan your move. You can track and manage your migration from the central dashboard using Azure Migrate.
It supports you by mapping your environment and estimating costs. Then, you can use it to create a phased migration plan to ensure ideal cloud performance. With Azure Migrate, you speed up product innovation and increase ROI.
Google Cloud’s Migrate for Compute Engine enables you to migrate from Amazon EC2, Azure, and VMware. The Migration Manager orchestrates the migration to monitor system components. It also has Cloud Extensions that serve data to migrated workloads during migration.
Migrate for Compute Engine also supports IT teams by reducing downtime, managing the simultaneous migration of thousands of VMs, and testing your migration before fully deploying.
Once you’ve migrated to the cloud, your next step is to manage your spending in the cloud. Cloud spending can only truly be reduced with the correct environment setup and monitoring.
AWS Cost Explorer is a comprehensive cost tool for forecasting and optimizing AWS spending. Forecasting enables you to estimate your bill. You can also add alarms and budgets to understand and manage your spending fully.
Cost Explorer also allows you to set up preconfigured views to understand your spending better and gain insights. You can also create custom reports to analyze your data in depth. Over time, you can identify patterns to understand your usage and spending.
Stratusphere provides you with a complete understanding of your AWS across all your accounts and environments. It’s ideal for a large enterprise that lacks financial visibility or PE firms with a portfolio of businesses that don’t have cost transparency.
With Stratusphere, you can see what you should focus on and prioritize your to-do list for more potential savings. You can also get accurate rankings of action items categorized by level of effort. You also get pre-built insights that offer the data and context you need to execute.
Using Cost Management, you gain visibility into trends and forecasts to increase accountability across teams. Financial governance policies can control costs and permissions. You can also optimize cloud spending with recommendations to optimize usage.
Google Cloud’s Cost Management allows you to adjust access control, create reports and dashboards, and improve your FinOps.
Your data is vulnerable during migration as it is moved from one system to another. To manage your security, it’s important to remain compliant and set up your new environment to comply with all regulations.
You can use AWS Config to assess, audit, and evaluate the configuration of your AWS resources. It enables you to analyze your organization’s compliance continuously.
AWS Config provides a full view of all your configuration resources, including the settings' previous and current status, so you can audit them correctly. It works with AWS, such as an Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (EC2) instance, an Amazon Elastic Block Store (EBS) volume, a security group, or an Amazon Virtual Private Cloud (VPC).
Azure Policy manages your policies, which define rules and effects over different resources. This application enforces compliance and security for your Azure account. It either flags non-compliance or blocks the deployment completely. Its dashboard provides a complete view of your environment.
Google Cloud has Security Health Analytics, which scans your cloud environment for misconfigurations that expose security weaknesses. It is part of the Security Commands Center, which provides comprehensive security management that works on Google and integrates with AWS if you use multiple cloud environments.
To choose the right tool to help you migrate, you need to decide on the following questions:
While having the right tools is important to migrate to the cloud successfully, it’s only part of the equation. You need to have the expertise to use them effectively is essential. Without complete understanding of how to migrate, setup, and use your new cloud environment you can fall into migration pitfalls.
Some in-house teams have this expertise, but many don’t have the time to focus on such a large project. Working with a cloud consultant can provide you with a group of experts working together to give you direction and support at every stage of your migration journey.
StratusGrid is your cloud consulting partner. We support you throughout the migration process, identify the best tools to reduce costs, and create a strategy based on your needs and goals.
We fully assess your needs based on a deep understanding of your needs and also cloud migrations. From there, we build your migration plan and foundations. We configure your cloud environment and run test migrations. Finally, we manage your full migration, from avoiding interruptions to reaching business priorities.
Book a consultation to understand our process and receive a full analysis.