Application migration helps organizations modernize and streamline their business operational processes even more effectively, allowing them to provide the best services to their clients and customers with improved productivity and customer service experience. Businesses can significantly improve the performance, scalability, and productivity of their application by migrating their application to the cloud. However, the process of migrating applications to the cloud is a bit complex as it involves numerous tedious tasks, as most of the applications are not built as cloud-native.

There are many issues and hurdles in application migration, including the reworking of applications, business complexity, security risks, and unexpected costs. Therefore, it requires proper planning for the migration to the cloud to ensure that everything goes smoothly.

Well, in this article, you will learn what is application migration and how to migrate your application to the cloud quickly and more seamlessly.

Before going with the application migration process, it is important to know what is application migration.

What is Application Migration?

Application migration can be defined as a process of moving existing software applications from one computing environment to another. In this process, applications are migrated from one data center to another, such as from a public to a private cloud. Companies may also move from their servers to a cloud provider's environment.

What is an Application Migration Strategy?

There are various types of strategies that can be used for migrating applications to the cloud more effectively. However, the best choice generally depends on various factors such as type of application, business needs, budget constraints, etc. Some of the most common options are below:

Move Without Conversion: Moving assets into a public cloud environment without changing their characteristics can result in significant savings. For example, moving a website from on-premises to the cloud can result in significant cost savings. In addition to this, the public cloud offers additional support and comes up with built-in cloud optimization functionality such as disaster recovery and on-demand volume expansion.

Choose a SaaS Replacement: Reducing the burden of the migration process as well as freeing up resources on-premises by using a SaaS offering that already does what you need can help reduce the migration burden.

Choose a PaaS replacement: With a subscription-based service, you can replace expensive on-premises server needs by choosing an existing platform-as-a-service (PaaS) without being required to adjust architecture. Using PaaS replacement, you will get more agility, especially when in high demand.

Re-architect: When you modernize an application or service by migrating to the cloud, you can introduce new and improved features, give an older but still valuable product a new life, and increase its value.

Retire: If a given workload doesn't add any value to the customer or does not have an inherent relationship with another workload, it can be retired.

What is the application migration process?

The application migration process includes the following 4 steps:

Application Planning: It involves complete planning of reviewing and evaluating business objectives, application complexity, required tools, and an experienced team to carry out the migration process.

You can make use of various other third-party software and tools for application migration. Using these tools can help manage and move your application data between platforms even more flawlessly with in-depth analysis and monitoring.

Application Testing: It is recommended to use mock migration to improve the process before you perform the app migration. Once the migration has been completed, the next you can test what has been moved into the new environment, document the results, and start the process again.

It helps the team to identify issues early with frequent testing and sandboxing, so they can regroup or change course before data is lost.

Migrate in waves: During this phase, you can group applications, which can then be migrated in phases. With the project management tool, you can document each phase to keep all informed including stakeholders.

Follow-up: After the migration is completed, it is best to perform follow-up testing to ensure whether the migration was done perfectly. This phase involves determining application performance, security, and any technical causes to fix them.

Application migration stages and steps

Application migration includes the following stages and steps:

Application assessment and analysis: The very first step includes the determination and assessment of your applications, including business needs and complexity. Based on the value of your business and strategy, you can categorize your starting computing system.

You should consider the impact on the business, the capacity of the application to meet the business needs, the complexity and control of the application, and its future. This way, you can determine the complexity of your migration process.

Cost of ownership: After you determine each aspect of application migration, the next thing is to evaluate the cost. For a complete picture of costs, you should include purchases, operations, and maintenance costs. Remember to include costs related to testing and training if you need to employ the new software.

Project planning: Finally, it’s time to make a plan for application migration based on information gathered from your research and calculations. Further, be sure to calculate the overall risk and timeframe for the migration.

Application migration checklist

The following are the checklists of application migration that need to be considered during the time of migration:

  • It is important to know who built the app, how old the application is where’s the document of the app, etc.
  • Determine the time for application migration like how long the process will be.
  • What is the volume of data going to move within the process?
  • Can we integrate the application with the system the way it was before?
  • What resources and tools are needed to make the application migration successful?
  • Identify the application's importance for users, which applications are used (production, development, testing), who manages it, how it works in conjunction with other applications, etc.
  • How can we ensure application data security?
  • Know the compliance requirements and whether it is subjected to service level agreement.

What Are the Common Types of Application Migrations?


1. Rehosting
Rehosting is also known as a "lift and shift" strategy used for deploying the existing application to an IaaS environment. The approach is used by businesses looking to scale up their migration process for a large legacy migration scenario.

As the application is already running in the cloud, it is relatively easy to migrate it as-is rather than using a cloud-native strategy, thus allowing time for optimizations and architectural adjustments.

2. Replatforming
"Replatforming" refers to upgrading an application from its current platform to the cloud while preserving its current functionality, as defined by Pivotal."

This allows you to use the cloud provider’s architecture for the application instead of making full-scale changes to the core architecture. It is proven to be an effective approach for applications that offer great value to the business but are not critical.

3. Repurchasing
The process involves moving to a SaaS platform and is run outside of the infrastructure and maintained by a third party. It doesn’t require you and your team to spend more time on its maintenance and updates when moving from an on-premises app to a SaaS platform.

For instance, it will help eliminate the time when moving the existing HR system to bambooHR. The strategy typically includes the current system to a new or different version or solution.

4. Refactoring / Re-architecting
By reviewing the existing architecture and environment of your application and comparing them to the concerns you are trying to address, it may become apparent that a partial cloud-native approach would be required to meet your business goals.

As an example, switching from an inherently monolithic to a serverless architecture would be a good example. This will help to enhance agility, scalability, and overall performance.

5. Retire
Further reviewing the environment can help you find out the application utility running within the system. Most often, parts of your IT portfolio that are no longer useful or should be eliminated are not considered, no attention is paid to them, and nothing is done about them.

The first step to cloud migration is retiring anything that is no longer valuable or was even used in the business. By doing this, the team can focus its cloud migration strategy on areas of the highest importance for the company.

6. Retain
Your legacy infrastructure retains a few components of your IT infrastructure. As an application owner, you may want to keep some stand-alone features, workloads, and databases due to some security concerns or other restrictions.

For instance, in a case where you need to comply with some regulatory requirements addressing the locations gathering certain info. This type of migration categorizes the workload into a hybrid infrastructure. Some workloads are retained on-premise, while others are hosted in the cloud.  

Application Migration project plan

Businesses need to create a migration plan, which should include the most effective strategy for migrating the applications within their portfolio in the right way. It is recommended to think like a project for the application migration and then design the migration plan with a successful approach.

Furthermore, make sure to calculate the schedule and budget limits and other important key factors with keen attention to detail. Before you start the process, be sure to know how old the application is and try to use advanced technology to better accomplish the project without affecting the side functionality of the application.

Application migration testing

Application migration testing is performed to analyze and compare the features of migrated applications with the legacy applications to find out any kind of issues or errors. The main motto of this testing is to ensure that the application migration is done correctly with no data loss and zero downtime.

During this phase, you can also evaluate the integrity of your computing system as well as the position of its elements in the target environment.

Application migration best practices

To ensure seamless and hassle-free application migration, it is imperative to follow the best practices, which include:

  • Evaluate the application and the environment for it
  • Create a document for application deployment
  • Take a backup and retain a test plan ready
  • Make the system ready for the migration
  • Involve the client in early planning for the migration
  • Evaluate and understand the total application stack to ensure all are migrated successfully
  • Be ready for optimizations after the migration
  • Automated migration to avoid repetitive tasks in the process

How long does the application migration schedule take?

It depends on the complexity of the project, application size, and the number of features. However, it may take somewhere from 2-4 months for medium-sized projects that include email migration and document management.

While it may take between 6-18 months for large-scale projects that include sophisticated server setups and cloud-native service configurations.

How Crest Infosystems manage an IT application migration project

Because many things can go wrong during the process of application migration because it is a more tedious task in many ways. For a business to succeed, a solid strategy is essential, and the execution strategy may vary widely from one case to the next, depending on several factors.

If we want to ensure the process fits into the planned timeline and budget, we must communicate and prepare everyone for the change as early as possible. The first step is to identify the requirements we will meet, which includes developing a solid migration plan and setting up a robust change management system. This will enable us to improve the quality of the teams' work and open up greater possibilities for the entire organization.

Are you planning to migrate your application to the cloud or planning to move it to a new computing environment from your existing software? And not sure how and where to start and need some expert advice, then contact a reliable cloud computing services provider today.