Multi-cloud migration is a process of distributing your digital assets across multiple cloud platforms to enhance resilience and efficiency. Organizations relying on multi-cloud strategies reportedly experience 45% fewer critical outages than those using a single provider. Besides, migrating to the multi-cloud enables enterprises to harness the best of cloud vendors’ offerings, achieving significant performance, flexibility, and budgeting improvements. So, how can you navigate the complexities of multi-cloud transition? In this guide, we will explore key migration steps, tips, and business outcomes of adopting the multi-cloud approach.
4 stages of multi-cloud migration: Roadmap and milestones
Migrating to multiple clouds is a comprehensive process with several considerations added to a regular migration roadmap. As opposed to single-cloud setups, a multi-cloud environment comes with specific interoperability requirements. It may call for containerization or the implementation of cloud-agnostic services to make workloads functional across different platforms. You also need to develop specific strategies to ensure data is accessible and synchronized across all environments.
At N-iX, we collaborate with your team to perform the migration in four key stages. Let’s review the phases and milestones our cloud experts outline.
Stage 1: Prepare
Adopting the multi-cloud should serve a clear purpose. This initial phase focuses on aligning the upcoming migration efforts with specific business objectives to maximize the return on investment. Several main steps to put the process in motion include:
Defining the objectives
Start by identifying the migration drivers—your business goals, technical requirements, and current challenges that could be tackled with cloud adoption. Also, consider your reasons behind opting for the multi-cloud approach. For instance, you may seek to incorporate particular provider-specific features or avoid vendor lock-in. The goals set during this stage will help create an effective migration strategy later on.
Securing stakeholders’ buy-in
Engage business, technology, and executive teams early to align your strategy with stakeholders’ needs and pave the way for a smooth transition. This step is crucial to ensure the migration accounts for individual workflows and minimizes operational bottlenecks across departments.
Consider partnering with a cloud consulting firm
Partnering with a cloud consultant early on allows you to focus on deriving the most value from the migration while an experienced firm handles the technical aspects expertly and securely. It helps you minimize the possibility of scope creep, avoid significant downtime leading to revenue loss, and navigate complex regulatory requirements. With a trusted migration partner, you can mitigate numerous risks and ensure a streamlined, efficient process.
Stage 2: Assess and plan
The next phase centers around taking stock of your digital estate, selecting suitable cloud providers, and designing a migration strategy. Here are the main steps N-iX experts perform during this stage:
Assessing your workloads
We evaluate the architecture, licensing, platform, and compliance requirements of the workloads to be migrated, as well as their cloud readiness. Additionally, we create a clear inventory of all network dependencies and interdependent assets to ensure they are deployed in the correct cloud.
Choosing your cloud providers
Selecting the right combination of cloud platforms is pivotal to maximizing the value of your migration. As a certified partner of Amazon AWS, Microsoft Azure, and Google Cloud Platform (GCP), N-iX has a deep knowledge of their offerings and experience implementing their services across multi-cloud environments. During this step, we can help you compare the leading providers and identify the best mix for your specific requirements.
Developing a migration strategy and plan
With a clear understanding of your objectives and infrastructure, we help you develop a cloud adoption strategy and a detailed action plan. A strategy encompasses the broader approach—why and how you move to the new environment—while a migration plan outlines a step-by-step execution roadmap. During this step, we perform a benefit analysis to ensure the strategy supports your objectives. We also plan out workload distribution to ensure seamless integration across several platforms and optimize costs, performance, and interoperability.
Once the strategy is in place, we create a phased plan for your multi-cloud migration. This includes:
- Defining migration waves;
- Prioritizing workloads based on criticality;
- Outlining the timeline for the process;
- Creating data backups;
- Designing a disaster recovery plan.
Ensuring security and compliance
Preparing to build robust cloud infrastructure security is a cornerstone in every migration project, especially when it comes to multi-cloud setups. As part of the planning process, we help you ensure data protection and regulatory compliance are maintained in your new dynamic environment. Our cloud security experts take into account:
- Data residence: what data will be stored on what cloud, considering potential geographical restrictions (for instance, sensitive data that must reside within a particular country);
- Dynamic environments: what rapid modifications, additions, removals, and transfers of resources can occur across multiple clouds;
- Diverse security standards: what compliance frameworks and security features each chosen cloud provider supports.
Stage 3: Deploy
At this stage, you’re almost ready to migrate your workloads. Here are several crucial steps of this process:
Creating a cloud landing zone
During this step, we set up and configure virtual machines, connectivity tools, storage accounts, compute instances, and security tools to create a resilient, high-performance target environment for your workloads on each of the chosen cloud platforms.
Preparing data for migration
Multi-cloud data migration involves transferring datasets or databases to appropriate cloud platforms while focusing on integrity, cross-cloud accessibility, and synchronization. Depending on the volume and complexity of data, we can use automated replication, native cloud tools, or third-party services to ensure a secure and streamlined transfer.
Executing the migration
To ensure the infrastructure and strategy align with your expected outcomes, we conduct a pilot migration and gradually scale the transition. N-iX engineers select the most suitable transformation method for each of your workloads, depending on the cloud readiness, your budget, and your desired timeframes. The options include rehosting, relocating, refactoring, replatforming, and repurchasing. In case a legacy application proves inefficient to be replicated, we can also consider retiring or retaining it.
Testing and validating
After transferring the workloads, we conclude the multi-cloud migration phase by conducting extensive testing and validation to ensure everything works as expected.
Stage 4: Optimize and maintain
Optimization and maintenance extend beyond the end of migration. These are ongoing efforts to ensure your workloads run efficiently and adapt to evolving demands without unnecessary expenses. The key steps to achieve this include:
Optimizing post-migration
As your business grows, your multi-cloud environment needs to remain cost-efficient while maintaining high performance. We can help you save costs and stay competitive by rightsizing resources, implementing cost optimization strategies, and modernizing your setup with emerging services and features.
Documenting the process
Adopting the multi-cloud is a dynamic process with continuous testing and optimization. By documenting this journey, you can simplify future troubleshooting and modernization efforts. Also, our experts can work with your teams to transfer the knowledge and help build up the necessary skills to maintain the new environment.
Monitoring and maintaining
Continuous monitoring and effective maintenance post-migration are crucial for reliability and operational excellence. We can integrate monitoring tools and automate reporting to ensure full visibility across your environment. By tracking performance, security, and system health, you can maintain consistency and compliance in your dynamic multi-cloud setup.
Key reasons for selecting multi-cloud over single-cloud
A well-implemented multi-cloud strategy presents several advantages over single-cloud systems. It offers enhanced flexibility, optimized costs, and architectural resilience that’s difficult to achieve without spreading your workloads across multiple environments. Let’s review four main strengths you can gain with multi-cloud migration.
1. Reduced vendor dependency
Imagine you’re using a single cloud for all your workloads and data, and the provider decides to cancel particular services, increase fees, or make changes that don’t align with your business or technical requirements. In this situation, shifting to a different platform would be a massive undertaking, both financially and time-wise.
Utilizing multiple clouds significantly reduces the risk of such vendor lock-in. Multi-cloud environments make your architecture less vendor-dependent and simplify moving assets between your clouds. This removes the operational burden of switching to a different single cloud and enables you to adapt to changes without major setbacks.
2. Increased cost-efficiency
With the multi-cloud comes an opportunity to benefit from dynamic pricing. All major providers offer pay-as-you-go fees, enabling you to select services from different vendors based on their cost-effectiveness and your specific usage patterns. Although integrating several platforms can be expensive, sound cost management can help you significantly optimize expenses in the long run.
3. High availability and efficient disaster recovery
Distributing workloads among multiple clouds reduces the risk of downtime in case one of the providers experiences an outage or a service disruption. If you add failover mechanisms when designing your multi-cloud setup, you will be able to quickly switch to another platform, ensuring high availability and uptime. Additionally, with multi-cloud data migration, improved redundancy and failover options can enhance disaster recovery capabilities.
4. Enhanced flexibility and performance optimization
In addition to diversifying providers for reliability, the multi-cloud gives you access to a broader range of unique offerings and services. This allows you to optimize performance by strategically using different clouds for different tasks. You can match specific features of each platform to your needs and ensure each workload runs in the most suitable environment.
Continue reading: Multi-cloud solutions: Why does your business need them?
3 main challenges of multi-cloud adoption
Even though it creates optimization opportunities for businesses, managing multiple clouds has its challenges. Our experts outline three main risks and tips on how to mitigate them:
1. Excessive cloud spending
While multi-cloud migration can drive long-term savings, it can incur significant upfront expenses related to workload transformation and staff training. Additionally, ongoing cloud costs can spiral without proper oversight, leading to budget overruns.
While you can reduce the financial strain during the migration with meticulous assessment and planning, further cost control requires continuous effort. To keep the ongoing costs from escalating, implement real-time monitoring, automated expense tracking, and optimization strategies. Utilize cloud-native tools, such as AWS Cost Explorer, Azure Cost Management, and Google Cloud Billing, to analyze your spending for each platform and adjust resource allocation.
2. Insufficient connectivity between clouds and on-prem infrastructure
Maintaining connectivity with the remaining on-premises systems has always been a prerequisite of cloud adoption, but the multi-cloud extends this demand. To build a functional environment, you need to establish consistent and reliable connections for your clouds—both with your on-premises infrastructure and among themselves. When done incorrectly, this can result in connectivity failures and network latency.
To address this challenge, consider adopting the hybrid approach and using a native service to build networks with dedicated connections. Services like AWS Direct Connect, Azure ExpressRoute, and Google Cloud Interconnect help link your cloud and on-premises networks, ensuring low-latency connectivity. For cloud-to-cloud connectivity, consider AWS Transit Gateway and Google Cloud Cross-Cloud.
3. Fragmented security and compliance measures
Maintaining cloud compliance is one of the top priorities for enterprise executives. However, establishing consistent security and compliance processes for multiple clouds comes with added complexity. Each cloud provider has their own security tools, frameworks, and regulations, making it difficult to enforce uniform policies. It can also limit your visibility into potential risks across the entire environment.
To create an evenly protected infrastructure, centralize visibility and policy enforcement. Use cloud security posture management (CSPM) tools like Wiz and Check Point CloudGuard to identify and mitigate risks across multiple cloud environments. Such tools maintain an inventory of your assets and offer real-time monitoring and proactive risk assessment to uncover any misconfigurations.
Why should you move to the multi-cloud with N-iX?
- N-iX is a certified AWS Premier Tier Services Partner, Microsoft Solutions Partner, and Google Cloud Platform Partner, which allows us to complete each project guided by industry best practices.
- During our 22 years of experience, we have successfully delivered over 200 cloud migration, transformation, governance, and architecture redesign projects.
- Our team comprises over 400 cloud experts, including more than 180 specialists certified by AWS, Azure, and GCP.
- We comply with rigorous data protection standards and regulations, including GDPR, ISO 27001, ISO 9001, and PCI DSS, to ensure your assets are protected throughout the entire migration process.
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