Glossary of terms

Cloud Migration

Cloud migration is the process of moving digital assets, resources, applications, data, and workloads from an on-premises infrastructure or a traditional hosting environment to a cloud computing environment. It involves transferring and deploying these components onto cloud-based platforms provided by cloud service providers such as Amazon Web Services (AWS), Microsoft Azure, or Google Cloud Platform (GCP).

Definition

Cloud migration is the act of partially or fully transitioning an organization’s digital resources, services, and computing capabilities from a traditional on-premises data center or server environment to a cloud computing infrastructure.

Main Features

1. Scalability: Cloud environments offer on-demand scalability, allowing organizations to easily scale resources up or down based on changing requirements and workloads.

2. Cost optimization: Cloud computing follows a pay-as-you-go model, where organizations only pay for the resources they consume, potentially reducing operational and infrastructure costs.

3. Flexibility and agility: Cloud environments enable rapid provisioning and deployment of resources, allowing organizations to quickly adapt to changing business needs and market conditions.

4. Automation and DevOps: Cloud platforms offer robust automation and DevOps tools, enabling faster software development, testing, and deployment processes.

5. Disaster recovery and business continuity: Cloud providers offer built-in disaster recovery and data backup solutions, ensuring high availability and business continuity for critical applications and data.

6. Security and compliance: Cloud providers offer advanced security features, such as encryption, access controls, and compliance with industry regulations (e.g., HIPAA, PCI-DSS, GDPR).

Scope of Cloud Migration

The scope of cloud migration can vary depending on the organization’s specific requirements and objectives. It can encompass a wide range of components, including:

1. Infrastructure migration: Moving physical servers, virtual machines, and networking components to cloud-based infrastructure services (e.g., Amazon EC2, Microsoft Azure Virtual Machines, Google Compute Engine).

2. Application migration: Migrating legacy applications, web applications, and databases to cloud-based platforms or refactoring them as cloud-native applications.

3. Data migration: Transferring and storing data, such as databases, file systems, and object storage, to cloud-based data storage solutions (e.g., Amazon S3, Azure Blob Storage, Google Cloud Storage).

4. Platform migration: Transitioning existing platforms and services, such as email, collaboration tools, and customer relationship management (CRM) systems, to cloud-based software-as-a-service (SaaS) solutions.

5. Analytics and big data migration: Moving data warehouses, data lakes, and analytics workloads to cloud-based big data and analytics platforms (e.g., Amazon Redshift, Azure Synapse Analytics, Google BigQuery).

Cloud migration can be a complex undertaking, and organizations often seek guidance and expertise from cloud service providers, consulting firms, or managed service providers to ensure a successful and efficient transition.

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