Based on an IDG survey, 77% of enterprises have at least one application or a portion of their enterprise computing infrastructure in the cloud. The benefits of cloud are evident, but the challenges of cloud migration have left some organizations hesitant to make a move.
Migrating on-premises applications and data to the cloud is a challenging process. There are many factors to consider, including the performance of applications in a new environment, latency issues, bandwidth constraints, and the management of your environment once it’s moved to the cloud. Also, after you decide to move to the cloud, it can be time-consuming to use traditional methods to design, develop, and deploy the infrastructure and move your data to the cloud. Cloud migration tools are a natural option to simplify this process.
What Is Cloud Migration Automation?
With cloud migration automation, moving to the cloud is easier than ever before. A variety of tools are now available to do the heavy lifting associated with cloud migration, helping companies increase their migration speed, reduce risks, and lower costs. Organizations leveraging automation tools can increase the success rate of their cloud migration projects and realize faster time-to-value. Here’s how cloud migration automation can help enterprises move to the cloud:
1. Reduce Migration Time
Before automation, cloud migration was time-consuming and complicated, relying on manual processes and legacy technology. Leveraging automation in your cloud migration process can drastically reduce the time and manual effort required for migrating enterprise applications, and can help you maintain the structure and integrity of migrated data. Cloud migration automation can help you avoid disruptions and costly overruns and deliver successful cloud migration projects on time.
2. Lower Migration Costs
According to a recent Forrester study, labor costs can make up half of cloud migration projects. With automation, organizations can eliminate some of the more repetitive tasks needed to move to the cloud and reduce these costs and move to the cloud faster without the burden of hiring additional staff. Cloud migration automation can deliver reliable, repeatable results across multiple environments to accelerate and simplify the migration process. It reduces human error and frees up staff time to focus on the higher-value, more strategic aspects of cloud migration.
3. Support Data Analytics
When approaching the migration, most companies find that their information is stored in separate systems, which generates the need for a case-by-case analysis due to process inconsistency, compatibility issues, and lack of automation. These challenges, coupled with a lack of understanding of the data conversion process among internal resources, usually result in high IT costs and a longer implementation cycle. Automation is helping IT teams globally reduce their data conversion efforts by up to 70% to better support data analytics needs. Automated data conversion tools can help you convert your data from legacy systems and Excel to make it compatible with modern cloud applications.
4. Minimize Business Disruption
Companies need to move and manage large volumes of data, services, and workflows to the cloud without business disruption. Using automation in the migration process accelerates your journey to the cloud, and helps mitigate the impact on business operations. Building a reliable approach to automated migration ensures that your cloud migration is smooth and fast, and critical applications and functions run optimally during the process.
