case study on cloud migration

10 Important Cloud Migration Case Studies You Need to Know

Aug 1, 2019 | Engineering

For most businesses considering cloud migration, the move is filled with promise and potential. Scalability, flexibility, reliability, cost-effectiveness, improved performance and disaster recovery, and simpler, faster deployment — what’s not to like? 

It’s important to understand that cloud platform benefits come alongside considerable challenges, including the need to improve availability and latency, auto-scale orchestration, manage tricky connections, scale the development process effectively, and address cloud security challenges. While advancements in virtualization and containerization (e.g., Docker, Kubernetes) are helping many businesses solve these challenges, cloud migration is no simple matter. 

That’s why, when considering your organization’s cloud migration strategy, it’s beneficial to look at case studies and examples from other companies’ cloud migration experiences. Why did they do it? How did they go about it? What happened? What benefits did they see, and what are the advantages and disadvantages of cloud computing for these businesses? Most importantly, what lessons did they learn — and what can you learn from them? 

With that in mind, Distillery has put together 10 cloud migration case studies your business can learn from. While most of the case studies feature companies moving from on-premise, bare metal data centers to cloud, we also look at companies moving from cloud to cloud, cloud to multi-cloud, and even off the cloud. Armed with all these lessons, ideas, and strategies, you’ll feel readier than ever to make the cloud work for your business.

Challenges for Cloud Adoption: Is Your Organization Ready to Scale and Be Cloud-first?

We examine several of these case studies from a more technical perspective in our white paper on Top Challenges for Cloud Adoption in 2019 . In this white paper, you’ll learn:

• Why cloud platform development created scaling challenges for businesses
• How scaling fits into the big picture of the Cloud Maturity Framework
• Why advancements in virtualization and containerization have helped businesses solve these scaling challenges
• How companies like Betabrand, Shopify, Spotify, Evernote, Waze, and others have solved these scaling challenges while continuing to innovate their businesses and provide value to users

#1 Betabrand : Bare Metal to Cloud

Betabrand (est. 2005) is a crowd-funded, crowd-sourced retail clothing e-commerce company that designs, manufactures, and releases limited-quantity products via its website. 

Migration Objective 

The company struggled with the maintenance difficulties and lack of scalability of the bare metal infrastructure supporting their operations. 

Planning for and adding capacity took too much time and added costs. They also needed the ability to better handle website traffic surges.

Migration Strategy and Results 

In anticipation of 2017’s Black Friday increased web traffic, Betabrand migrated to a Google Cloud infrastructure managed by Kubernetes (Google Kubernetes Engine, or GKE). They experienced no issues related to the migration, and Black Friday 2017 was a success. 

By Black Friday 2018, early load testing and auto-scaling cloud infrastructure helped them to handle peak loads with zero issues. The company hasn’t experienced a single outage since migrating to the cloud.

Key Takeaways

• With advance planning, cloud migration can be a simple process. Betabrand’s 2017 on-premise to cloud migration proved smooth and simple. In advance of actual migration, they created multiple clusters in GKE and performed several test migrations, thereby identifying the right steps for a successful launch.
• Cloud streamlines load testing. Betabrand was able to quickly create a replica of its production services that they could use in load testing. Tests revealed poorly performing code paths that would only be revealed by heavy loads. They were able to fix the issues before Black Friday. 
• Cloud’s scalability is key to customer satisfaction. As a fast-growing e-commerce business, Betabrand realized they couldn’t afford the downtime or delays of bare metal. Their cloud infrastructure scales automatically, helping them avoid issues and keep customers happy. This factor alone underlines the strategic importance of cloud computing in business organizations like Betabrand. 

#2 Shopify : Cloud to Cloud

Shopify (est. 2006) provides a proprietary e-commerce software platform upon which businesses can build and run online stores and retail point-of-sale (POS) systems. 

Shopify wanted to ensure they were using the best tools possible to support the evolution needed to meet increasing customer demand. Though they’d always been a cloud-based organization, building and running their e-commerce cloud with their own data centers, they sought to capitalize on the container-based cloud benefits of immutable infrastructure to provide better support to their customers. Specifically, they wanted to ensure predictable, repeatable builds and deployments; simpler and more robust rollbacks; and elimination of configuration management drift. 

By building out their cloud with Google, building a “Shop Mover” database migration tool, and leveraging Docker containers and Kubernetes, Shopify has been able to transform its data center to better support customers’ online shops, meeting all their objectives. For Shopify customers, the increasingly scalable, resilient applications mean improved consistency, reliability, and version control.

• Immutable infrastructure vastly improves deployments. Since cloud servers are never modified post-deployment, configuration drift — in which undocumented changes to servers can cause them to diverge from one another and from the originally deployed configuration — is minimized or eliminated. This means deployments are easier, simpler, and more consistent.
• Scalability is central to meeting the changing needs of dynamic e-commerce businesses. Shopify is home to online shops like Kylie Cosmetics, which hosts flash sales that can sell out in 20 seconds. Shopify’s cloud-to-cloud migration helped its servers flex to meet fluctuating demand, ensuring that commerce isn’t slowed or disrupted.

#3 Spotify: Bare Metal to Cloud

Spotify (est. 2006) is a media services provider primarily focused on its audio-streaming platform, which lets users search for, listen to, and share music and podcasts.

Spotify’s leadership and engineering team agreed: The company’s massive in-house data centers were difficult to provision and maintain, and they didn’t directly serve the company’s goal of being the “best music service in the world.” They wanted to free up Spotify’s engineers to focus on innovation. They started planning for migration to Google Cloud Platform (GCP) in 2015, hoping to minimize disruption to product development, and minimize the cost and complexity of hybrid operation. 

Spotify invested two years pre-migration in preparing, assigning a dedicated Spotify/Google cloud migration team to oversee the effort. Ultimately, they split the effort into two parts, services and data, which took a year apiece. For services migration, engineering teams moved services to the cloud in focused two-week sprints, pausing on product development. For data migration, teams were allowed to choose between “forklifting” or rewriting options to best fit their needs. Ultimately, Spotify’s on-premise to cloud migration succeeded in increasing scalability while freeing up developers to innovate. 

• Gaining stakeholder buy-in is crucial. Spotify was careful to consult its engineers about the vision. Once they could see what their jobs looked like in the future, they were all-in advocates. 
• Migration preparation shouldn’t be rushed. Spotify’s dedicated migration team took the time to investigate various cloud strategies and build out the use case demonstrating the benefits of cloud computing to the business. They carefully mapped all dependencies. They also worked with Google to identify and orchestrate the right cloud strategies and solutions. 
• Focus and dedication pay huge dividends. Spotify’s dedicated migration team kept everything on track and in focus, making sure everyone involved was aware of past experience and lessons already learned. In addition, since engineering teams were fully focused on the migration effort, they were able to complete it more quickly, reducing the disruption to product development.

#4 Evernote : Bare Metal to Cloud

Evernote (est. 2008) is a collaborative, cross-platform note-taking and task management application that helps users capture, organize, and track ideas, tasks, and deadlines.

Evernote, which had maintained its own servers and network since inception, was feeling increasingly limited by its infrastructure. It was difficult to scale, and time-consuming and expensive to maintain. They wanted more flexibility, as well as to improve Evernote’s speed, reliability, security, and disaster recovery planning. To minimize service disruption, they hoped to conduct the on-premise to cloud migration as efficiently as possible. 

Starting in 2016, Evernote used an iterative approach : They built a strawman based on strategic decisions, tested its viability, and rapidly iterated. They then settled on a cloud migration strategy that used a phased cutover approach, enabling them to test parts of the migration before committing. They also added important levels of security by using GCP service accounts , achieving “encryption at rest,” and improving disaster recovery processes. Evernote successfully migrated 5 billion notes and 5 billion attachments to GCP in only 70 days. 

• Cloud migration doesn’t have to happen all at once. You can migrate services in phases or waves grouped by service or user. Evernote’s phased cutover approach allowed for rollback points if things weren’t going to according to plan, reducing migration risk. 
• Ensuring data security in the cloud may require extra steps. Cloud security challenges may require extra focus in your cloud migration effort. Evernote worked with Google to create the additional security layers their business required. GCP service accounts can be customized and configured to use built-in public/private key pairs managed and rotated daily by Google.
• Cloud capabilities can improve disaster recovery planning. Evernote wanted to ensure that they would be better prepared to quickly recover customer data in the event of a disaster. Cloud’s reliable, redundant, and robust data backups help make this possible. 

#5 Etsy : Bare Metal to Cloud

Etsy (est. 2005) is a global e-commerce platform that allows sellers to build and run online stores selling handmade and vintage items and crafting supplies.

Etsy had maintained its own infrastructure from inception. In 2018, they decided to re-evaluate whether cloud was right for the company’s future. In particular, they sought to improve site performance, engineering efficiency, and UX. They also wanted to ensure long-term scalability and sustainability, as well as to spend less time maintaining infrastructure and more time executing strategy.

Migration Strategy and Results

Etsy undertook a detailed vendor selection process , ultimately identifying GCP as the right choice for their cloud migration strategy . Since they’d already been running their own Kubernetes cluster inside their data center, they already had a partial solution for deploying to GKE. They initially deployed in a hybrid environment (private data center and GKE), providing redundancy, reducing risk, and allowing them to perform A/B testing. They’re on target to complete the migration and achieve all objectives. 

Key Takeaways 

• Business needs and technology fit should be periodically reassessed. While bare metal was the right choice for Etsy when it launched in 2005, improvements in infrastructure as a service (IaaS) and platform as a service (PaaS) made cloud migration the right choice in 2018.
• Detailed analysis can help businesses identify the right cloud solution for their needs. Etsy took a highly strategic approach to assessment that included requirements definition, RACI (responsible, accountable, consulted, informed) matrices, and architectural reviews. This helped them ensure that their cloud migration solution would genuinely help them achieve all their goals.
• Hybrid deployment can be effective for reducing cloud migration risk. Dual deployment on their private data center and GKE was an important aspect of Etsy’s cloud migration strategy. 

#6 Waze : Cloud to Multi-cloud

Waze (est. 2006; acquired by Google in 2013) is a GPS-enabled navigation application that uses real-time user location data and user-submitted reports to suggest optimized routes.

Though Waze moved to the cloud very early on, their fast growth quickly led to production issues that caused painful rollbacks, bottlenecks, and other complications. They needed to find a way to get faster feedback to users while mitigating or eliminating their production issues.  

Waze decided to run an active-active architecture across multiple cloud providers — GCP and Amazon Web Services (AWS) — to improve the resiliency of their production systems. This means they’re better-positioned to survive a DNS DDOS attack, or a regional or global failure. An open source continuous delivery platform called Spinnaker helps them deploy software changes while making rollbacks easy and reliable. Spinnaker makes it easy for Waze’s engineers to deploy across both cloud platforms, using a consistent conceptual model that doesn’t rely on detailed knowledge of either platform .  

• Some business models may be a better fit for multiple clouds. Cloud strategies are not one-size-fits-all. Waze’s stability and reliability depends on avoiding downtime, deploying quick fixes to bugs, and ensuring the resiliency of their production systems. Running on two clouds at once helps make it all happen. 
• Your engineers don’t necessarily have to be cloud experts to deploy effectively. Spinnaker streamlines multi-cloud deployment for Waze such that developers can focus on development, rather than on becoming cloud experts. 

Deploying software more frequently doesn’t have to mean reduced stability/reliability. Continuous delivery can get you to market faster, improving quality while reducing risk and cost.

#7 AdvancedMD : Bare Metal to Cloud

AdvancedMD (est. 1999) is a software platform used by medical professionals to manage their practices, securely share information, and manage workflow, billing, and other tasks. 

AdvancedMD was being spun off from its parent company, ADP; to operate independently, it had to move all its data out of ADP’s data center. Since they handle highly sensitive, protected patient data that must remain available to practitioners at a moment’s notice, security and availability were top priorities. They sought an affordable, easy-to-manage, and easy-to-deploy solution that would scale to fit their customers’ changing needs while keeping patient data secure and available.

AdvancedMD’s on-premise to cloud migration would avoid the need to hire in-house storage experts, save them and their customers money, ensure availability, and let them quickly flex capacity to accommodate fluctuating needs. It also offered the simplicity and security they needed. Since AdvancedMD was already running NetApp storage arrays in its data center, it was easy to use NetApp’s Cloud Volumes ONTAP to move their data to AWS. ONTAP also provides the enterprise-level data protection and encryption they require.

• Again, ensuring data security in the cloud may require extra steps. Though cloud has improved or mitigated some security concerns (e.g., vulnerable OS dependencies, long-lived compromised servers), hackers have turned their focus to the vulnerabilities that remain. Thus, your cloud migration strategy may need extra layers of controls (e.g., permissions, policies, encryption) to address these cloud security challenges.
• When service costs are a concern, cloud’s flexibility may help. AdvancedMD customers are small to mid-sized budget-conscious businesses. Since cloud auto-scales, AdvancedMD never pays for more cloud infrastructure than they’re actually using. That helps them keep customer pricing affordable.

#8 Dropbox : Cloud to Hybrid

Dropbox (est. 2007) is a file hosting service that provides cloud storage and file synchronization solutions for customers.

Dropbox had developed its business by using the cloud — specifically, Amazon S3 (Simple Storage Service) — to house data while keeping metadata housed on-premise. Over time, they began to fear they’d become overly dependent on Amazon: not only were costs increasing as their storage needs grew, but Amazon was also planning a similar service offering, Amazon WorkDocs. Dropbox decided to take back their storage to help them reduce costs, increase control, and maintain their competitive edge. 

While the task of moving all that data to an in-house infrastructure was daunting, the company decided it was worth it — at least in the US (Dropbox assessed that in Europe, AWS is still the best fit). Dropbox designed in-house and built a massive network of new-breed machines orchestrated by software built with an entirely new programming language, moving about 90% of its files back to its own servers . Dropbox’s expanded in-house capabilities have enabled them to offer Project Infinite, which provides desktop users with universal compatibility and unlimited real-time data access.

• On-premise infrastructure may still be right for some businesses. Since Dropbox’s core product relies on fast, reliable data access and storage, they need to ensure consistently high performance at a sustainable cost. Going in-house required a huge investment, but improved performance and reduced costs may serve them better in the long run. Once Dropbox understood that big picture, they had to recalculate the strategic importance of cloud computing to their organization.  
• Size matters. As Wired lays out in its article detailing the move , cloud businesses are not charities. There’s always going to be margin somewhere. If a business is big enough — like Dropbox — it may make sense to take on the difficulties of building a massive in-house network. But it’s a huge risk for businesses that aren’t big enough, or whose growth may stall.

#9 GitLab : Cloud to Cloud

GitLab (est. 2011) is an open core company that provides a single application supporting the entire DevOps life cycle for more than 100,000 organizations. 

GitLab’s core application enables software development teams to collaborate on projects in real time, avoiding both handoffs and delays. GitLab wanted to improve performance and reliability, accelerating development while making it as seamless, efficient, and error-free as possible. While they acknowledged that Microsoft Azure had been a great cloud provider, they strongly believed that GCP’s Kubernetes was the future, calling it “a technology that makes reliability at massive scale possible.” 

In 2018, GitLab migrated from Azure to GCP so that GitLab could run as a cloud-native application on GKE. They used their own Geo product to migrate the data, initially mirroring the data between Azure and GCP. Post-migration, GitLab reported improved performance (including fewer latency spikes) and a 61% improvement in availability.    

• Containers are seen by many as the future of DevOps. GitLab was explicit that they view Kubernetes as the future. Indeed, containers provide notable benefits, including a smaller footprint, predictability, and the ability to scale up and down in real time. For GitLab’s users, the company’s cloud-to-cloud migration makes it easier to get started with using Kubernetes for DevOps.
• Improved stability and availability can be a big benefit of cloud migration. In GitLab’s case, mean-time between outage events pre-migration was 1.3 days. Excluding the first day post-migration, they’re up to 12 days between outage events. Pre-migration, they averaged 32 minutes of downtime weekly; post-migration, they’re down to 5. 

#10 Cordant Group : Bare Metal to Hybrid

The Cordant Group (est. 1957) is a global social enterprise that provides a range of services and solutions, including recruitment, security, cleaning, health care, and technical electrical.

Over the years, the Cordant Group had grown tremendously, requiring an extensive IT infrastructure to support their vast range of services. While they’d previously focused on capital expenses, they’d shifted to looking at OpEx, or operational expenses — which meant cloud’s “pay as you go” model made increasing sense. It was also crucial to ensure ease of use and robust data backups.

They began by moving to a virtual private cloud on AWS , but found that the restriction to use Windows DFS for file server resource management was creating access problems. NetApp Cloud ONTAP, a software storage appliance that runs on AWS server and storage resources, solved the issue. File and storage management is easier than ever, and backups are robust, which means that important data restores quickly. The solution also monitors resource costs over time, enabling more accurate planning that drives additional cost savings. 

• Business and user needs drive cloud needs. That’s why cloud strategies will absolutely vary based on a company’s unique needs. The Cordant Group needed to revisit its cloud computing strategy when users were unable to quickly access the files they needed. In addition, with such a diverse user group, ease of use had to be a top priority.
• Cloud ROI ultimately depends on how your business measures ROI. The strategic importance of cloud computing in business organizations is specific to each organization. Cloud became the right answer for the Cordant Group when OpEx became the company’s dominant lens. 

Which Cloud Migration Strategy Is Right for You?

As these 10 diverse case studies show, cloud strategies are not one-size-fits all. Choosing the right cloud migration strategy for your business depends on several factors, including your:

• Goals. What business results do you want to achieve as a result of the migration? How does your business measure ROI? What problems are you trying to solve via your cloud migration strategy? 
• Business model. What is your current state? What are your core products/services and user needs, and how are they impacted by how and where data is stored? What are your development and deployment needs, issues, and constraints? What are your organization’s cost drivers? How is your business impacted by lack of stability or availability? Can you afford downtime? 
• Security needs. What are your requirements regarding data privacy, confidentiality, encryption, identity and access management, and regulatory compliance? Which cloud security challenges pose potential problems for your business?
• Scaling needs. Do your needs and usage fluctuate? Do you expect to grow or shrink? 
• Disaster recovery and business continuity needs. What are your needs and capabilities in this area? How might your business be impacted in the event of a major disaster — or even a minor service interruption? 
• Technical expertise. What expertise do you need to run and innovate your core business? What expertise do you have in-house? Are you allocating your in-house expertise to the right efforts? 
• Team focus and capacity. How much time and focus can your team dedicate to the cloud migration effort? 
• Timeline. What business needs constrain your timeline? What core business activities must remain uninterrupted? How much time can you allow for planning and testing your cloud migration strategy? 

Of course, this list isn’t exhaustive. These questions are only a starting point. But getting started — with planning, better understanding your goals and drivers, and assessing potential technology fit — is the most important step of any cloud migration process. We hope these 10 case studies have helped to get you thinking in the right direction. 

While the challenges of cloud migration are considerable, the right guidance, planning, and tools can lead you to the cloud strategies and solutions that will work best for your business. So don’t delay: Take that first step to helping your business reap the potential advantages and benefits of cloud computing. 

Ready to take the next step on your cloud journey? As a Certified Google Cloud Technology Partner , Distillery is here to help. Download our white paper on top challenges for cloud adoption to get tactical and strategic about using cloud to transform your business.  

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Chris Stokel-Walker

Case studies in cloud migration: netflix, pinterest, and symantec.

In October 2008, Neil Hunt, chief product officer at Netflix, gathered a meeting of a dozen or so of his engineering staffers in The Towering Inferno, the secluded top-floor meeting room at Netflix’s Los Gatos, CA headquarters. The room, which Netflix CEO Reed Hastings occasionally commandeers as his personal office, is away from the main office hustle and bustle of the start-up company, up a flight of stairs and across an outdoor wooden walkway up on the building’s rooftop—the ideal place for big-picture thinking.

Big thoughts were needed, because Netflix had a problem: its backend client architecture was, to put none too fine a term on it, crumbling more than the Colosseum and leaning more than the Tower of Pisa.

“We kept having issues with connections and threads,” Hunt  recalled  at an industry conference in Las Vegas, NV, six years later. “At one point we upgraded the machine to a fantastic $5 million box and it crashed immediately because the extra capacity on the thread pools meant we ran out of connection pools more quickly.”

It was an unenviable position to be in for the firm, which had introduced online streaming of its vast video library the year before. Netflix had just partnered with Microsoft to get its app on the Xbox 360, and had agreed to terms with the manufacturers of Blu-ray players and TV set-top boxes to service their customers. Millions of potential users of a new, game-changing technology were about to encounter what we now know as the multi-billion dollar industry of online video streaming that would transform Netflix from a failing company that mailed DVDs to movie buffs into a television and movie studio that rivaling some of Hollywood’s biggest names.

But, back in 2008, with a backend that couldn’t cope, the public wasn’t about to encounter anything—unless Netflix made some changes.

There were two points of failure in the physical technology, Hunt explained to the conference audience in Las Vegas: The disk array that ran Netflix’s database—a single Oracle database on an array of Blade webservers—and the single box that talked to it.

“We knew we were approaching a point where we needed to make this redundant,” said Hunt. But Netflix hadn’t yet forked out the cash for second data center that would alleviate the problem. “We were vulnerable to those single points of failure.”

“Let’s rethink this completely, go back to first principles, and think about doing it in the cloud.”

That much became abundantly clear in 2008 when the company pushed a piece of firmware to the disk array. It corrupted Netflix’s database, and the company had to spend three days scrambling to recover. (One contemporary news story on the outage—and the customer outrage it sparked—noted that some customers even went back to Blockbuster, which Netflix had made seem decrepit, for their DVDs.) “That wasn’t a total catastrophe because most customers weren’t reliant on the system being up to get value from the service,” explained Hunt—but as Netflix’s DVD mailing arm wound down and its new streaming service caught on, it would become a problem.

“We thought: ‘Let’s rethink this completely, go back to first principles, and think about doing it in the cloud’,” said Hunt.

Over the course of several meetings in The Towering Inferno, Hunt and his team thrashed out a plan that would ensure that database corruption—and the many other issues with connections and threads that seemed to plague the company back in 2008—would never happen again. They’d move to the cloud.

Whether companies are looking to run their applications serving millions of users or to underpin the databases and file servers of multinational businesses, the cloud provides a low-cost, flexible way to ensure reliable IT resources. Firms don’t need to worry about the physical upkeep of their own private data centers storing information; they can build out capacity as and when it’s needed, lowering costs and increasing their adaptability—important features for a young startup with unpredictable (and potentially limitless) growth. It has been a recent boon, born out by technological innovation, that helps power hundreds of thousands of companies, big and small, across the globe.

For Netflix, the move to the cloud proved a prescient decision: between December 2007 and December 2015, the number of hours of content streamed on Netflix increased one thousand times, and the company had eight times as many people signed up to the service at the end of its cloud migration process as it did at the start. Cloud infrastructure was able to stretch to meet this expanding demand while traditional server racks in a data center were not able to (the number of requests per month called through Netflix’s API  outstripped  the capacity of its traditional data center near the end of 2010). It also proved to be a major cost-saving move.

But at the same time, the cloud was still an unproven, young technology. Amazon, the current leader in cloud computing, had only been offering their Amazon Web Services (AWS) infrastructure products since 2006. Caution was required. Netflix started small, moving over a single page onto AWS to make sure the new system worked. “It’s nicely symbolic,” said Hunt. “We recognised that along the way we probably need to hire some new skills, bring in some new talent, and rethink our organisation.” The company chose AWS over alternative public cloud suppliers because of its breadth of features and its scale, as well as the broader variants of APIs that AWS offered.

“When Netflix made the decision to go all-in on the cloud, most people were barely aware the cloud existed.”

Today, the cloud is many companies’ first choice when it comes to storing data and serving their customers. AWS is a $12 billion company, four times bigger than it was in 2013. It has—and has long had—a 40% market share in the public cloud sector, much more than the combined market share of Microsoft, Google and IBM’s cloud offerings combined,  according to data  collated by Synergy Research Group. Those that aren’t utilising the cloud often feel they want to, and are frustrated when they can’t: Four in 10 businesses have critical company data trapped in legacy systems that can’t be accessed or linked to cloud services, according to a survey by market research company Vanson Bourne for commercial software company Snaplogic, while three in four say that their organization misses out on opportunities because of disconnected data. Vendors’ revenue from the sales of infrastructure products—including server, storage and Ethernet switches—for cloud IT topped $8 billion in the first quarter of 2017, according to analysts IDC.

But none of that was the case when Netflix started its great migration, nor was it true when Ruslan Meshenberg started at Netflix in January 2011, two years into Netflix’s big move. As one of the first companies to move its services into the cloud, Netflix was literally writing the rulebook for many of the tasks it was undertaking. Meshenberg was thrown in at the deep end.

“That was the very first set of objectives I was given,” he explains. “A complete data-center-to-cloud migration for a core set of platform services. Day one.”

It involved a lot of outside the box thinking—and plenty of trailblazing. “When Netflix made the decision to go all-in on the cloud, most people were barely aware the cloud existed,” he explains. “We had to find solutions to a lot of problems, at a time when there were not a lot of standard, off-the-shelf solutions.”

And the problems, when tackling such an enormous task as the migration of a company the size of Netflix, were numerous—particularly for a team used to the mindset that their system operated in a physical data center.

“When you’re operating in a data center,” says Meshenberg, “you know all of your servers. Your applications are running only on a particular set of hardware units.” The goal for the company in a physical data center is a simple one: keep the hardware running at all times, at all costs. That’s not the case with the cloud. Your software runs on ephemeral instances that aren’t guaranteed to be up for any particular duration, or at any particular time. “You can either lament that ephemerality and try to counteract it, or you can try and embrace it and say: ‘I’m going to build a reliable, available system on top of something that is not.’”

Which is where Netflix’s famed  Simian Army  comes in. You have to build a system that can fail—in part—while keeping up as a whole. But in order to figure out if your systems have that ability baked into their design, you need to test it.

Netflix built a tool that would self-sabotage its system, and christened it Chaos Monkey. It would be unleashed on the cloud system, wreaking havoc, bringing down aspects of the system as it rampaged around. The notion might seem self-defeating, but it had a purpose. “We decided to simulate the conditions of a crash to make sure that our engineers can architect, write and test software that’s resilient in light of these failures,” explains Meshenberg.

In its early days, Chaos Monkey’s tantrums in the cloud were a dispiriting experience. “It was painful,” Meshenberg admits. “We didn’t have the best practices, and so many of our systems failed in production. But now, since our engineers have this built-in expectation that our systems will have to be tested by Chaos Monkey, in production they’re now writing their software using the best practices that can withstand such destructive testing.”

Even without Chaos Monkey, there were still early setbacks, including a significant outage across North America on Christmas Eve 2012 thanks to an AWS update to elastic load balancers that tipped Netflix offline—a chastening event. But the company adapted, and came through it. By 2015 all of Netflix’s systems—bar its customer and employee data management databases, and billing and payment components—had been migrated to AWS. It would take a little longer before Meshenberg’s team could celebrate a job complete, but the relatively bump-free path (and the easy scaling up of systems as Netflix’s customer base skyrocketed) vindicated the move.

“The crux of our decision to go into the cloud,” says Meshenberg, was a simple one: “It wasn’t core to our business to build and operate data centers. It’s not something our users get value from. Our users get value from enjoying their entertainment. We decided to focus on that and push the underlying infrastructure to a cloud provider like AWS.”

For Netflix, dipping their toe into the water of cloud computing wasn’t an option. They had to dive in headfirst.

That said, making the leap was a brave move—not least given that, particularly when Netflix began its migration in 2009 and even when Meshenberg joined the company in 2011, cloud storage was still a relatively unknown technology in the Valley, and an unknown term to the general public. (The Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers (IEEE)  held  just its fourth ever international conference on cloud computing in Washington DC in 2011; technology analysts Gartner were still able, back in 2011, to  publish  a $2,000 “Hype Cycle” report explaining a technology that was on the rise.) Though those in the know understood the benefits of migrating to the cloud, and had a hunch that the general consensus would follow them, early adopters were still just that—pioneers pushing out the boundaries for the technology.

Going all-in on the cloud required betting on the future—and hoping that others would follow. But for Netflix, dipping their toe into the water of cloud computing wasn’t an option. They had to dive in headfirst.

“We had little doubt that cloud was the future,” explains Meshenberg. “If it was, it didn’t make sense to hedge our bets and straddle both worlds, because that would mean we would lose the focus of getting something done completely to the end.”

There was another factor in the decision for Netflix, too: scalability. “Our business was growing a lot faster than we would be able to build the capacity ourselves,” Meshenberg recalls. “Every time you grow your business your traffic grows by an order of magnitude, you have to rewrite the rules. The thing that worked for you at a smaller scale may no longer work at the bigger scale. We made a bet that the cloud would be a sufficient means in terms of capacity and capability to support our business, and the rest was figuring out the technical details of how.”

For Raj Patel, considering anything but the cloud was never really an option. Head of Cloud Engineering at Pinterest from 2014–2016, Patel joined a company that still had to engineer another move: from Amazon Web Service’s legacy cloud to a next-generation cloud system. “It wasn’t any different, frankly, than moving from a data center to the public cloud,” explains Patel. “We did a migration inside of Amazon.”

The move was one that some at the startup were wary of, even despite its benefits. “A cloud migration, in many cases, doesn’t necessarily get them anything,” says Patel. “The appeal has to be why they should do this before the five other things they were thinking about doing for their own group.”

At a small, nimble startup like Pinterest, time and resources are scarce, and an engineering team’s to-do list is as long as the sum of their collective arms. Getting people on-side with the cloud migration required deftness, discussion—and categorically not a top-down edict. It also required going person-to-person, winning small victories in support of the larger battle.

“You have to intuitively appeal or influence the motivations of an individual engineer to achieve your goal,” says Patel. “What I found was that at the earlier stages of the program I explicitly looked for folks that are early adopters or have a vested interest in doing that program or project, and you really focus on making them really successful. Then if the others see it they’ll get on board.”

Certain groups at Pinterest had pent-up frustrations with the older generation of Amazon’s cloud service, particularly when it same to the elasticity of potential future expansion. Data engineering-intensive applications ran up against walls with the old cloud server. Patel saw an in.

“We focused on those who would benefit the most,” he says, selling them on the idea of migrating over to a new cloud server, better equipped to deal with the developments they wanted to introduce. Patel’s team provided those early adopters with the tools to help them smoothly migrate over to the new cloud. That included embedding a consultant or solution engineer (rebranded “site reliability engineers” so as not to ruffle any feathers within the groups they joined) with each application team, who was able to provide the relevant tools and know-how to help ease the transition over to AWS. What the site reliability engineers from Patel’s team didn’t do, though, was impose any ideas or tools on the teams they joined.

"We focused on those who would benefit the most,” selling them on the idea of migrating over to a new cloud server, better equipped to deal with the developments they wanted to introduce.

“Any time you do a cloud migration—especially with engineers—there’s always this notion of: ‘Here’s my way of doing it, here’s your way of doing it: What’s the right way of doing it?’,” explains Patel. “If you had an outside group tell you this is the only way you’re going to do it, you’re going to run into a lot of friction.”

Rather, the teams worked collaboratively, engendering a sense of common purpose. Pinterest was, in truth, always going to make the move, and the company could have become forceful with its ideas, but Patel wanted a more consensual approach. “Their success is embedded with that application team,” says Patel. “Even though they might be talking about a central tool or approach, they’re perceived from the perspective of that application team.”

Like a pyramid scheme, the early adopters found success, and became proselytisers for the move. “When they talk to others at lunch, they say the migration is going really well; the guys doing it are really helpful, and it’s going just fantastic,” says Patel. “The next time you talk to the sceptics, they say: ‘Let’s go and do it.’”

At the same time, those systems that had successfully made the cloud-to-cloud migration were crowed about internally. Data democracy was crucial, says Patel, in getting across the message that the migration was something to be welcomed, not shunned. “We had important metrics about the progress we were making and would send it out to the whole engineering team to let them see it,” he explains. “People like data—engineers especially. They resonate with that progress.”

Six months later, Pinterest had transferred its backend to the more modern cloud system. The team held a party to celebrate the successful move, but truthfully, it was just another success for a company that has plenty of them.

“Think about it,” says Patel. “This was a company that was doubling or tripling in size every year. When I joined the company it was making $0 in revenue and the first year it was $100 million or something, then the next year something like three times that amount. That was the norm across the entire company. In some ways, it was just business as usual.”

When Patel moved to Symantec in April 2016 to become vice president for cloud platform engineering, things were far from business as usual.

“The magnitude of challenges are, I’d say, 5× with Symantec,” he explains. “That’s one of the things I’ve come to realize: While it’s interesting to talk about companies like Pinterest, Facebook or Instagram, their problem is already solved. They have some of the brightest engineers in the world, their applications are already designed for these cloud-type elastic architectures. In some ways, the challenge is not that interesting. But when you’re dealing with a 30-plus year-old company like Symantec, the challenge is a lot more interesting.”

For decades, Symantec had provided stability and assurance to customers—important, given its role as a security service. Unlike Pinterest, which was born in the cloud seven years ago, Symantec was founded in 1982, when computers were massive, hulking bits of hardware, hardwired to the wall. The company had been in business before the world wide web appeared as long as Pinterest has been in business, period. A publicly listed company—accountable to shareholders, with $3.6 billion of turnover—comes with more levels of hierarchy than a nimble, community-focused startup born in the Valley.

“There are more business units with general managers, instead of application teams,” explains Patel. “All those barriers are a lot more rigid in a larger enterprise than they are in the more nimble, engineering organisation approach you find in a startup.” There are also people who have been working in the company longer than some of Pinterest’s brightest young engineers—individuals who have decades of experience, and rightly should be listened to when they pass comment on the merits of such a move into the cloud. “Frankly, there were a lot of sceptics, and real architectural challenges in applications that simply have not been designed for the cloud,” says Patel. His work would end up closing down 27 separate data centers around the world and moving everything into the public cloud. The scale seemed almost insurmountable.

Even the business case for convincing staff at Symantec was more difficult; it simply wasn’t as easy an argument to make, because if it ain’t broke, why fix it?

“Your influencing job is probably 5× harder,” says Patel. “Because of the cultural transformation, you have to be a lot more convincing. You’re telling people to work differently which is very difficult, and sometimes the organization has the appetite to do those things, and sometimes they don’t.”

Much like Ruslan Meshenberg felt the need to win over his staff members, and just as Patel had to leverage the enthusiasm of early adopters at Pinterest to convince those who were less keen on taking the leap into the cloud, at Symantec Patel had to undergo a similar “hearts and minds” campaign.

Guided by Patel’s boss, the executive vice president of the sector, his team decided to show, not tell, fellow Symantec staffers about the benefits of cloud migration. “We took all the major classes of application and did a proof of concept for each one of them,” he explains. Patel’s team broke down the challenge, piece by piece, drawing up a technical feasibility study for each application, working with each group’s architect, building a proof of concept that could convince them such a move would work— “as opposed to saying: ‘We’re just going to run off this cliff and it’s going to work.’”

The attitude was a simple one: “Let’s remove the risk, and show that.”

It worked. Conviction built around the move; the only thing left to discuss was how exactly to handle the migration.

Big legacy companies planning a move to the cloud are faced with one of two options: They can go down the lift-and-shift path, or the fix-and-shift route.

The lift-and-shift route is the (comparatively) easy option. You take your pre-existing application as it presently works in a private data center, and make the minimum possible changes before moving it into the cloud. “I understand there’s going to be benefits to moving to the cloud, and I’m probably not going to realise most of them, but we’ll fix it later,” says Patel of the lift-and-shift approach.

Fix-and-shift is harder, but potentially more beneficial. You’re not just going to do the bare minimum work to ensure your application—which worked fine in an offline data center—will work in the cloud. You’re buying into the concept of moving to the cloud, fixing your culture along the way, and making it more adaptable to the new norm.

“A lot of the time what you’ll find is that traditional IT organisations tend to do lift-and-shift,” says Patel. “They’re taking the same thing they had in their private data centres and, whether it’s a corporate mandate or whatever, they say: ‘Let’s just go and move it to the cloud.’ They’re looking for roughly the same technical or organisational approaches to operating in the cloud before the cloud,” he adds. “And in my view, that’s why a lot of those efforts fail.”

It was the same choice that Neil Hunt and his team had considered back in The Towering Inferno conference room. “We could take the existing app, forklift it, and shove it into AWS, then start to chip away at it,” he explained. “That was unappealing. It would be easy to do but we’d bring along a lot of bad architecture and a lot of bad habits.”

Netflix’s second choice was equally unappealing at first glance, simply because of the scale of the task. “We would run our existing infrastructure, and side by side run our AWS infrastructure, and migrate one piece at a time, from one system to another.” As the cloud migration occurred, Netflix totally transformed. Its application also changed from a hulking, single monolithic application to a clutch of small microservices, each of which can be developed independent of the others. It recast the way the company thought about everything, completely changing the shape and makeup of the firm.

Years after Netflix’s brave decision to undergo the wholesale application and infrastructure refactor, Symantec came to the same decision: They’re fixing, then they’re shifting. Patel still has a way to go before he can breathe easily: The process has taken—and will take—time, but he’s hopeful about reaching the finish line that lingers temptingly on the horizon.

“I’ll personally feel a lot more excitement when we’re done here at Symantec, just because we’ll have done so much more organisationally,” he explains.

Patel already knows the jubilation that’s felt when you move an entire company into the cloud, and can’t wait to feel that again. For Ruslan Meshenberg, who had helped guide Netflix into the cloud without any major hitches, there was only one way to celebrate the achievement. It’s what Silicon Valley does best: Hold an amazing party.

“We had some fun, and we shared some battle stories,” says Meshenberg. The team shared a sense of achievement—personally and as a group. “Cloud migration involves every single person in a company, whether they’re engineering or not,” he adds.

Meshenberg, who had only known cloud migration in his time with the company, could move on from the project he was handed on the first day of his job, to task number two. It must’ve seemed easy-going in comparison, you’d think. “Relatively speaking,” he agrees — “but probably not less challenging. The only constant is change itself. Nothing stands still. We have to constantly re-evaluate our assumptions and ensure that our ecosystem evolves as well.”

“Cloud migration involves every single person in a company, whether they’re engineering or not.”

But Meshenberg still holds with him that sense of pride that his team and colleagues pulled off a major cloud migration without much of a hitch—and that they confounded the critics along the way, remaining ahead of the technical curve.

“When we went into the cloud we faced a lot of external scepticism, people saying this will never work, or that it may work but not for us,” he says. “It might not be secure enough, scalable enough—you name it.”

There’s a brief pause, a moment as Meshenberg collects his thoughts. Eventually, he comes out with 10 short words: “It was good to be able to get it done.”

About the author

Chris Stokel-Walker is a UK-based features journalist for The Economist , Bloomberg , the BBC, and Wired UK . His first book, YouTubers , was published in 2019, and his second, TikTok Boom, was published in July 2021.

Ray Oranges / Machas

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Case Studies: Successful Cloud Migration Stories

• Case Studies: Successful Cloud Migration…

Introduction

In today’s rapidly evolving digital landscape, the transition to cloud computing represents a pivotal shift for businesses seeking agility, scalability, and cost efficiency. Cloud migration, the process of moving digital assets like data, applications, and IT processes to cloud infrastructure, has become a critical strategy for organizations aiming to stay competitive and responsive to market demands.

As we delve into the world of cloud migration, this article aims to provide real-world insights through case studies of businesses that have successfully navigated the journey to the cloud. We will explore the challenges they faced, the strategies employed, and the benefits they reaped. These stories serve as valuable lessons for other businesses contemplating a similar transition.

Case Study 1: Large Retail Corporation’s Transition to AWS

Background of the company.

This case study examines a large retail corporation, known for its vast network of stores and an extensive range of products. The company has been a significant player in the retail industry for decades, with a robust physical presence and a growing online footprint. As the retail landscape evolved, the company recognized the need to innovate and adapt, particularly in its approach to data management and customer experience.

Challenges Faced Before Migration

• Scalability Issues: The company’s existing IT infrastructure struggled to handle the increasing volume of data and transactions, especially during peak shopping seasons.
• Cost Inefficiency: Maintaining and upgrading physical servers was becoming prohibitively expensive, diverting funds from other critical areas like customer experience and product development.
• Data Silos and Integration Challenges: Data was scattered across different departments, leading to inefficiencies and inconsistencies in reporting and analysis.
• Lack of Agility: The existing infrastructure did not allow for rapid deployment of new features or services, impeding the company’s ability to respond to market trends and customer demands.

The Migration Process

• Planning and Assessment: The company collaborated with AWS experts to develop a comprehensive migration strategy. This included assessing their existing infrastructure, data requirements, and future scalability needs.
• Pilot Projects: Before full-scale migration, the company initiated pilot projects for critical applications to understand the complexities and refine the process.
• Data Migration: A phased approach was used to migrate data. The company utilized AWS tools like AWS Database Migration Service to ensure a smooth transition.
• Application Refactoring: Some legacy applications were refactored to be cloud-native, taking full advantage of AWS services and scalability.
• Employee Training and Change Management: To ensure a smooth transition, the company invested in training its employees in cloud technologies and new operational processes.

Benefits Realized Post-Migration

• Enhanced Scalability and Performance: AWS’s scalable infrastructure allowed the company to efficiently handle traffic spikes and manage data growth.
• Cost Savings: The pay-as-you-go model of AWS significantly reduced operational costs. The company saved on hardware costs and the expenses related to maintaining physical servers.
• Improved Data Analytics and Insights: With AWS’s integrated analytics tools, the company gained deeper insights into customer behavior, enabling data-driven decision-making.
• Increased Agility and Innovation: The cloud environment enabled the company to rapidly deploy new features and services, responding swiftly to market trends and enhancing customer experience.
• Enhanced Security and Compliance: AWS’s robust security features ensured better protection of sensitive data, aligning with industry compliance standards.

The transition to AWS marked a turning point for the retail corporation. Not only did it address the immediate challenges of scalability, cost, and agility, but it also positioned the company to be more innovative and customer-centric. This case study exemplifies how a well-planned and executed cloud migration can transform a traditional business into a modern, agile enterprise, ready to face the challenges of the digital age.

Case Study 2: Financial Services Company’s Shift to Azure

Company profile.

This case study focuses on a prominent financial services company, offering a range of services including banking, investment, and insurance. Established over a century ago, the company has built a reputation for stability and trust. However, in the digital era, it faced the challenge of modernizing its infrastructure to stay competitive and meet evolving customer expectations.

Pre-Migration Issues

• Regulatory Compliance and Security Concerns: As a financial institution, the company was bound by strict regulatory requirements for data security and privacy. Their legacy systems were becoming inadequate for the evolving compliance landscape.
• Inefficient Legacy Systems: The company’s aging infrastructure was not only costly to maintain but also lacked the flexibility and efficiency needed for modern financial services.
• Data Management Challenges: With the growing volume of data, their existing setup struggled to provide the necessary processing power for real-time analytics, a critical component in financial services.
• Limited Customer Experience Capabilities: The company’s inability to quickly deploy new customer-facing applications hindered their capacity to provide innovative services and engage with customers digitally.

Steps Taken for Migration

• Strategic Planning with Azure Experts: The company worked closely with Microsoft Azure specialists to create a tailored migration strategy that aligned with their business goals and regulatory requirements.
• Risk Assessment and Compliance Alignment: A thorough risk assessment was conducted to ensure that the migration would adhere to financial regulatory standards. Azure’s compliance offerings were a key factor in this process.
• Hybrid Cloud Approach: Initially, the company adopted a hybrid cloud model, keeping some sensitive operations on-premise while moving others to Azure. This approach provided flexibility and eased the transition.
• Application and Data Migration: Critical applications were moved to Azure, leveraging Azure’s robust infrastructure and security features. Data migration was handled cautiously to ensure integrity and security.
• Employee Upskilling and Change Management: Significant investments were made in training employees to adapt to the new cloud-based environment and processes.

Outcomes and Advantages

• Enhanced Security and Compliance: Azure’s advanced security features and compliance certifications provided the company with a robust framework, ensuring data safety and regulatory adherence.
• Improved Scalability and Performance: The Azure cloud environment allowed for seamless scaling of resources during demand fluctuations, crucial for financial operations.
• Cost Efficiency: By moving to Azure, the company reduced its operational costs significantly, eliminating expenses associated with maintaining physical data centers.
• Advanced Data Analytics Capabilities: Azure’s analytics tools enabled the company to process large datasets efficiently, providing real-time insights for better decision-making.
• Innovation in Customer Services: With the flexibility offered by Azure, the company was able to rapidly develop and deploy new customer-centric applications, enhancing customer experience and engagement.

The migration to Azure was a transformative journey for the financial services company. It not only resolved the immediate challenges of compliance, data management, and customer engagement but also positioned the company for future growth and innovation. This case study demonstrates how cloud migration, when strategically planned and executed, can empower traditional institutions to reinvent themselves in the digital age.

Case Study 3: Healthcare Provider’s Move to Google Cloud Platform (GCP)

Introduction to the healthcare provider.

This case study examines a large healthcare provider known for its comprehensive range of services, including hospital care, outpatient services, and telemedicine. With a network of healthcare facilities across various regions, the provider is recognized for its commitment to patient care and medical innovation. As healthcare increasingly embraced digital solutions, this provider sought to leverage technology to enhance patient care and operational efficiency.

Challenges in Data Management and Security

• Massive Data Volumes: Handling the vast amounts of patient data, including medical records, imaging data, and laboratory results, was becoming increasingly complex and demanding on the existing IT infrastructure.
• Security and Privacy Concerns: Given the sensitive nature of health data, the provider faced significant challenges in ensuring data privacy and security, a critical aspect given the stringent regulatory standards like HIPAA.
• Lack of Scalability: The existing IT infrastructure was not scalable enough to keep up with the growing data needs and the rapid adoption of telehealth services.
• Integration Issues: Integrating various data sources and systems for a unified patient view was difficult with the outdated technology stack.

Migration Strategy

• Comprehensive Assessment with GCP Experts: The healthcare provider collaborated with Google Cloud Platform specialists to assess their current infrastructure and devise a tailored cloud migration strategy.
• Data Security and Compliance Focus: A major emphasis was placed on ensuring that the migration to GCP complied with healthcare-related regulations and standards for data security.
• Phased Migration Approach: The migration was executed in phases, beginning with less critical systems to minimize disruptions in patient care services.
• Utilization of GCP’s Healthcare-specific Solutions: The provider leveraged GCP’s healthcare-specific tools and services, such as the Healthcare API, for seamless data integration and management.
• Training and Support for Staff: Comprehensive training programs were implemented to familiarize the staff with the new cloud-based systems and processes.

Post-Migration Improvements

• Enhanced Data Management and Analytics: With GCP, the provider benefited from improved data storage, management, and analytics capabilities, enabling more effective patient care and research.
• Robust Security and Compliance: GCP’s strong security features and compliance with healthcare standards provided a secure environment for patient data, addressing privacy concerns.
• Increased Scalability and Flexibility: The cloud infrastructure allowed the provider to easily scale resources up or down based on demand, particularly valuable for handling the surge in telehealth consultations.
• Improved Patient Care and Services: The integration of various data sources into a cohesive cloud platform enabled more personalized and efficient patient care, with quicker access to patient records and diagnostic tools.
• Cost Efficiency: Transitioning to GCP reduced the overall IT maintenance costs, allowing more resources to be allocated to patient care and medical research.

The migration to Google Cloud Platform marked a significant step forward for the healthcare provider in its digital transformation journey. By overcoming the challenges of data management, security, and scalability, the provider not only enhanced its operational efficiency but also elevated the level of patient care it could offer. This case study serves as a testament to the transformative potential of cloud technology in the healthcare sector, especially when tailored to meet the unique needs and regulatory demands of the industry.

Comparative Analysis

The case studies of a retail corporation’s transition to AWS, a financial services company’s shift to Azure, and a healthcare provider’s move to Google Cloud Platform (GCP) provide insightful perspectives on cloud migration across different industries. Despite the distinct nature of each sector, there are common challenges, unique issues, and overarching benefits that can be observed.

Common Challenges Faced in All Three Cases

• Data Management and Scalability: All three organizations struggled with managing large volumes of data and required scalable solutions to accommodate growth.
• Security and Compliance: Ensuring data security and meeting industry-specific regulatory compliance standards was a universal concern.
• Legacy System Inefficiencies: Each organization faced challenges with outdated infrastructure that was costly to maintain and inefficient in meeting modern demands.
• Need for Enhanced Performance and Agility: There was a common need to improve operational efficiency and rapidly deploy new features or services.

Unique Challenges and Solutions

• Challenge: Handling massive data and transaction volumes, particularly during peak seasons.
• Solution: Leveraging AWS’s scalable infrastructure to efficiently handle traffic spikes and manage data growth.
• Challenge: Adhering to strict financial regulatory requirements for data security and privacy.
• Solution: Utilizing Azure’s compliance offerings and advanced security features tailored for financial institutions.
• Challenge: Integrating various data sources and systems for a unified patient view, while complying with healthcare regulations.
• Solution: Adopting GCP’s healthcare-specific tools like the Healthcare API for seamless data integration and management, ensuring regulatory compliance.

Overall Benefits of Cloud Migration

• Cost Efficiency: All three organizations realized significant cost savings by reducing expenses related to maintaining physical data centers and legacy systems.
• Improved Security and Compliance: The cloud providers’ robust security features and adherence to industry-specific compliance standards addressed the organizations’ security concerns.
• Enhanced Scalability and Flexibility: The cloud environment enabled these organizations to scale resources as needed, accommodating growth and fluctuating demands.
• Data-Driven Insights and Decision Making: Improved data analytics capabilities facilitated by cloud services allowed for more informed decision-making and strategy development.
• Innovation and Enhanced Customer/Patient Experience: The agility afforded by the cloud enabled faster deployment of new services and applications, improving customer and patient experiences.

The comparative analysis of these case studies highlights how cloud migration, despite its challenges, offers substantial benefits across diverse sectors. While the specific challenges and solutions vary depending on the industry, the overarching advantages of improved efficiency, scalability, security, and innovation remain consistent. These case studies serve as compelling examples for other organizations considering cloud migration, demonstrating the transformative impact of cloud technology in modernizing and enhancing business operations.

AND E-Commerce Pvt. Ltd: Facilitating Successful Cloud Transformations

Introduction to and e-commerce pvt. ltd.

AND E-Commerce Pvt. Ltd is a burgeoning player in the field of cloud solutions and digital transformation services. As a company dedicated to helping businesses navigate the complexities of cloud migration and digital integration, AND E-Commerce Pvt. Ltd stands out for its comprehensive approach and commitment to client success. With a team of certified experts and a strong focus on leveraging the latest technologies, the company has established itself as a trusted partner for businesses looking to harness the power of the cloud.

Their Expertise in GCP, AWS, and Azure

AND E-Commerce Pvt. Ltd boasts a diverse team of professionals certified in Google Cloud Platform (GCP), Amazon Web Services (AWS), and Microsoft Azure. This wide-ranging expertise allows the company to provide tailored solutions that fit the unique needs of each client, regardless of the cloud platform they choose.

• GCP Expertise: Specializing in GCP, AND E-Commerce offers services ranging from cloud architecture design to data analytics and machine learning solutions on Google’s platform.
• AWS Proficiency: With AWS-certified professionals, the company excels in creating scalable, secure, and cost-effective cloud solutions on AWS, catering to a wide range of industries.
• Azure Skills: The Azure team at AND E-Commerce is adept at harnessing the strengths of Microsoft’s cloud services, particularly for enterprises seeking integration with existing Microsoft products and services.

How They Assist Businesses in Cloud Transformation

AND E-Commerce Pvt. Ltd assists businesses in cloud transformation through a structured and client-centric approach:

• Consultation and Strategy Development: They begin with a comprehensive assessment of the client’s existing infrastructure, business goals, and specific challenges to develop a tailored cloud migration strategy.
• Customized Migration Plans: Understanding that each business has unique needs, the company crafts customized migration plans that minimize disruption and maximize efficiency.
• Implementation and Integration: AND E-Commerce manages the entire migration process, ensuring seamless integration of cloud services with existing business processes and systems.
• Continuous Support and Optimization: Post-migration, they provide ongoing support and optimization services to ensure that cloud infrastructures continue to meet the evolving needs of the business.

Services Offered and Unique Value Proposition

AND E-Commerce Pvt. Ltd offers a comprehensive suite of services:

• Cloud Migration and Management: From initial assessment to full-scale migration and ongoing management, they cover all aspects of cloud adoption.
• Data Analytics and Machine Learning: Leveraging cloud capabilities to provide advanced data analytics and machine learning services, helping clients gain deeper insights and competitive advantages.
• Security and Compliance: Offering robust security solutions tailored to each cloud platform, ensuring data protection and regulatory compliance.
• Custom Application Development: Developing cloud-native applications that are scalable, efficient, and aligned with business objectives.

The unique value proposition of AND E-Commerce Pvt. Ltd lies in its holistic approach, combining technical expertise with a deep understanding of business processes. This dual focus ensures that their cloud solutions not only meet technical requirements but also drive business growth and innovation.

AND E-Commerce Pvt. Ltd stands as a beacon for businesses looking to embark on or enhance their cloud journey. Their blend of expertise across major cloud platforms, commitment to tailored solutions, and focus on client success make them an ideal partner for companies seeking to leverage the benefits of cloud technology. Whether it’s through enhancing operational efficiency, enabling data-driven decision-making, or ensuring scalability and security, AND E-Commerce Pvt. Ltd is well-equipped to guide businesses through the transformative journey of cloud migration.

The case studies of the large retail corporation’s transition to AWS, the financial services company’s shift to Azure, and the healthcare provider’s move to Google Cloud Platform (GCP) have illuminated the multifaceted nature of cloud migration. Each case presented unique challenges but also shared common difficulties such as data management, security, compliance, and the need for scalability and agility. The solutions tailored to each scenario showcased the versatility and robustness of cloud technology in addressing industry-specific needs. The overall benefits, including enhanced performance, cost efficiency, improved security, and innovation, underscore the transformative impact of cloud migration across various sectors.

The Future of Cloud Migration

The future of cloud migration looks promising and is poised to become more integral to business operations. As technology continues to evolve, cloud platforms are expected to offer even more advanced features and capabilities. This evolution will likely include enhanced artificial intelligence and machine learning functionalities, greater emphasis on cybersecurity, and more sophisticated tools for data analytics and integration. The trend towards multi-cloud and hybrid cloud strategies will likely grow, offering businesses more flexibility and customization options. Moreover, the increasing focus on sustainability in the tech industry might lead to cloud solutions that are not only efficient but also environmentally friendly.

Final Thoughts on the Role of Companies like AND E-Commerce Pvt. Ltd

In this evolving landscape, the role of companies like AND E-Commerce Pvt. Ltd becomes increasingly crucial. As cloud migration becomes more complex and integral to business success, the need for expert guidance and tailored solutions grows. Companies like AND E-Commerce Pvt. Ltd, with their expertise across various cloud platforms and commitment to customized service, are well-positioned to help businesses navigate this transition. They not only provide the technical know-how but also understand the business implications of cloud technology, ensuring that their clients not only migrate to the cloud but also thrive there.

In conclusion, cloud migration is not just a trend but a fundamental shift in how businesses operate and compete in the digital age. With the right strategy and partnership, like that offered by AND E-Commerce Pvt. Ltd, organizations can harness the full potential of the cloud, paving the way for innovation, efficiency, and continued growth. As we move forward, the synergy between business needs and technological advancements will continue to shape the future of cloud computing, making it an exciting and pivotal area for businesses and service providers alike.

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Cloud migration is the process of moving data, applications and workloads from an on-premises data center to a cloud-based infrastructure, or from one cloud environment to another, known as cloud-to-cloud migration.

A company might migrate to either a single cloud or multiple. They can use public cloud models, where services are delivered over the public internet, or private cloud models, with a secure, proprietary cloud infrastructure accessible only to them. Many organizations choose a  hybrid cloud environment, which combines public and private cloud services to create a single, flexible, cost-effective IT infrastructure that supports and automates workload management across cloud environments.

Multiclouds offer another option, which allows companies to migrate IT infrastructure by using multiple public cloud providers. Multiclouds can be as simple as using software as a service (SaaS) from different vendors to employ portability features across infrastructures. However, they often involve managing enterprise applications on platform as a service (PaaS) or infrastructure as a service (IaaS) across multiple cloud vendors—such as Amazon Web Services, Google Cloud Platform, IBM Cloud® and Microsoft Azure—from a central console.

Strategic application modernization is one key to transformational success that can boost annual revenue and lower maintenance and running costs.

Achieve workplace flexibility with DaaS

There are different types of cloud migration, varying in terms of what is being migrated and where it is moving to:

This cloud migration is the process of moving all data, applications and services from on-premises data centers to a cloud provider’s servers. This process is generally extensive and requires thorough planning and testing to ensure efficient execution.

Hybrid cloud migration involves moving a portion of resources to public cloud while leaving others in on-premises data centers. This hybrid cloud scenario allows organizations to take advantage of current investments in on-premises infrastructure while also using the flexibility, efficiency, strategic value and other benefits of public cloud.

Enterprises also use hybrid cloud migration for data backup. In this case, a company backs up its private cloud resources on a public cloud as a mitigation technique when an attack or disaster renders an on-premises data center inoperable.

Organizations might move their resources from one public cloud to another for many reasons. These reasons include taking advantage of specific pricing models, security features or products (such as new AI or machine learning tools) or because of changes to company structure or service level agreements.  

Another option is to migrate specific workloads to the cloud. For example, an organization might choose to migrate certain databases or mainframes to the cloud as a way to capitalize on lower costs, or for more reliable performance, better security and other factors.

Cloud migration has become a modernization imperative for businesses looking to streamline IT operations, implement cost-saving measures and realize end-to-end digital transformation . Tech analysts predict that 75% of organizations will adopt cloud-based data infrastructure by 2026. 1

To ensure a successful transition, organizations should follow a well-defined workflow that focuses on comprehensive planning, execution and optimization.

The first step in the workflow is cloud migration planning , which includes clearly articulating the business case for the migration. After the team has established the reasons for the migration, it’s important thoroughly assess existing IT infrastructure , apps and data to identify what’s suitable for migration and to assess dependencies that require attention. In this phase, teams typically:

• List and categorize apps and data
• Analyze app dependencies and interdependencies
• Evaluate security and compliance requirements
• Assess performance and scalability needs
• Establish migration goals and priorities
• Identify potential migration challenges

When the assessment is complete, it’s time to select the cloud provider that best aligns with business needs. Some factors to consider:

• Provider compatibility with existing apps and data
• Service offerings, pricing models and support capabilities
• Data sovereignty and compliance considerations
• Scalability and availability of required resources
• Interoperability with existing systems

This process involves determining how apps, data and infrastructure are organized in the cloud environment. Key considerations include:

• Designing scalable and resilient cloud architectures
• Defining networking and security configurations
• Identifying appropriate cloud services and features
• Optimizing cost-efficiency and performance
• Ensuring data backup and disaster recovery mechanisms

In this stage, the team transfers the existing IT infrastructure to the new cloud environment. Depending on the migration strategy (such as lift-and-shift, replatforming or refactoring), the execution process involves:

• Setting up the target cloud environment
• Provisioning virtual machines, storage and network resources
• Replicating or migrating data to the cloud
• Deploying and configuring apps in the new cloud infrastructure

Rigorous testing is vital to ensuring the functionality of newly transferred apps and data. Many teams choose to conduct:

• Functional testing to validate application migration
• Performance and load testing to assess scalability and responsiveness
• Security testing to identify vulnerabilities and ensure compliance
• User acceptance testing to validate end-user experience

It’s also important to resolve any issues or bugs identified during the testing and validation process.

At this point, the focus shifts to optimizing the cloud resources and configurations. This step entails:

• Fine-tuning applications
• Installing the necessary security measures and access controls
• Setting up monitoring and alerting mechanisms
• Streamlining resource usage
• Establishing governance and management processes

But cloud adoption isn’t a single-step process. Massive infrastructure and data transfers require continuous, real-time performance monitoring to really optimize the features of the new cloud infrastructure and ensure the long-term success of the migration. Organizations should be prepared to update or upgrade software and security protocols, scale up or down based on demand patterns, and monitor cloud costs to optimize cost-effectiveness.

Successful cloud migration requires a comprehensive strategy that lays out migration goals and anticipates challenges. For instance, legacy applications in an organization’s network might not be optimized for the cloud, so they must be prepared for the process with migration tools and approaches designed for the task.

Migration strategy should account for workloads that move to the cloud, the workloads that stay within the on-premises infrastructure, and any new capabilities or applications the team should add after the migration is complete. The migration plan should also include roadmaps, timelines, project metrics and goals, and a strategy for relaying information to team leaders, cloud vendors and other stakeholders.

While each company’s exact approach will vary based on their circumstances and cloud service needs, there are some tried-and-true cloud migration strategies that can streamline the process.

Typically the quickest and least complex migration approach, rehosting (also called lift-and-shift) involves migrating applications and data from onsite infrastructure to a cloud platform without making significant changes to the architecture, likely by using IaaS tools. However, this transfer strategy doesn’t fully take advantage of cloud-native features, so it’s best for applications that aren’t tightly coupled to the underlying infrastructure.

A replatforming (also known as lift-and-reshape) cloud strategy attempts to use some cloud-native features while maintaining compatibility by making specific, but minimal, changes to the existing IT architecture. A few examples of cloud-native features include  microservice architecture, Kubernetes containers and  machine learning models. 

A refactoring, or rearchitecting, approach requires the organization to redesign and redevelop applications by using a PaaS tool to fully use cloud-native capabilities. Since it often requires significant changes to existing architecture, it tends to make data migration more scalable, resilient and efficient in the cloud environment. Refactoring allows businesses to maximize the business value of cloud systems and use modern architectural patterns and models, such as microservices and serverless computing.

The repurchasing strategy involves retiring an existing application and replacing it with a SaaS alternative. Instead of migrating the application to the cloud, businesses opt for a cloud-based SaaS system that meets their needs. This approach provides instant access to cloud-based applications without the need for significant development efforts. Repurchasing can be useful for transferring non-core applications like email, customer relationship management  and human resources management.

Finally, to implement a retiring approach, businesses must decommission outdated and unused applications. As part of the migration process, teams identify extraneous applications or systems and shut them down, reducing maintenance costs, eliminating redundant resources and streamlining the migration process by focusing only on critical applications.

Be sure to cover specific use cases (for example, mission-critical enterprise applications,  data backup and recovery , productivity or collaboration applications, software development projects) for the workloads you’re migrating. Defining use cases up front enables better strategy decisions and smoother execution.

Companies worldwide are embracing cloud migration for the various benefits that cloud computing offers. Here are just a few ways that an organization can benefit from cloud migration:

Because cloud-based infrastructure removes many of the physical and financial obstacles to scalability (for example, data center infrastructure, or onsite server maintenance), it enables businesses to easily upscale or downscale their IT requirements when necessary.

Cloud services let businesses subscribe to workload management services on a pay-as-you-go basis. Instead of adding onsite capacity to anticipate future needs, companies can pay for the capacity they need now and scale on demand. Cloud services also help lower costs associated with setting up and running onsite data centers, which often require hefty hardware and utility expenditures and a large network of servers.

Although no system is foolproof, cloud service providers implement extensive measures to protect sensitive data, and comply with industry standards and government regulations. Security tools and protocols can protect cloud environments and cloud environments can automate software and security updates, measures that reduce security risk. 2

Furthermore, cloud migration helps ensure data safety. In the event of a disaster, cloud infrastructure facilitates data recovery and helps maintain business continuity with minimal downtime, latency issues or data loss.

Migrating applications to the cloud empowers businesses to adopt new technologies faster and enables affordable, just-in-time technology adoption in response to new business opportunities.

For instance, if a retail company wants to introduce an AI-driven recommendation system to its online store without cloud infrastructure, the company must make considerable hardware investments. These investments include the cost of purchasing, installing and maintaining on-premises infrastructure, and hiring personnel to manage it. It would also take quite a while to get the new infrastructure up and running. With a cloud-based infrastructure, the company might install the new AI system, at scale, within minutes, significantly reducing the time between decision-making and implementation.

The Instana Observability platform provides real-time performance data that helps businesses optimize their hybrid cloud networks and make the most of cloud migration investments. 

The IBM Turbonomic platform provides cloud migration planning that allows you to optimize your cloud consumption from the start and simplify your cloud migration process.

IBM Consulting® cloud migration services help manage cloud migration for your business, allowing you to focus on everything else.

Before embarking on the cloud migration process, use these six steps to gain a clear understanding of what’s involved to successfully migrate applications to the cloud.

Based on research from Forrester, this report will help your business start the modernization journey with migration to the cloud.

See how a combination of observable IT components, machine learning and AI makes it possible to recognize brewing software problems before they become incidents.

IaaS, PaaS and SaaS are the three most popular types of cloud service offerings. They are sometimes referred to as cloud service models or cloud computing service models.

Application migration is the process of moving a software application from one computing environment to another.

Lift and shift is the process of migrating an exact copy of an application or workload, together with its data store and OS, from one environment to another.

IBM Turbonomic allows you to run applications seamlessly, continuously and cost-effectively to help achieve efficient app performance while lowering costs.

1 “ Gartner Forecasts Worldwide Public Cloud End-User Spending to Reach Nearly USD 600 Billion in 2023 ” (link resides outside ibm.com), Gartner, 19 April 2023

2 “ Understanding Patches and Software Updates ” (link resides outside ibm.com), CISA, 23 February 2023

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Cloud Computing, Cloud Migration

Strategizing Effective Cloud Migrations with an Example Case Study

By CloudThat

According to Gartner, by the end of 2021, 70% of organizations worldwide have migrated at least some workloads to the public cloud. Also, Gartner has identified 6 important factors that can derail cloud migration strategies of companies have been identified and they are: Choosing a wrong cloud migration ally, rushed application assessments, setting the wrong emphasis, poor landing zone designs, dependency bottlenecks, and hidden indirect costs. This blog post decodes how CloudThat  has helped its clients to ensure a seamless and cost-effective cloud migration and helped them to meet their business objectives.

Introduction

As organizations scale, customer demand increases rapidly. To meet the increasing demands, organizations tend to opt for newer and advanced cloud technologies. Cloud Service providers are competing today to provide improved reliability and customer experience through their software applications. While adopting new cloud technologies is a challenge, adhering to the budget without compromising the security posture can prove to be next to impossible without an expert.   

CloudThat offers consulting and system integration services to our clients along with cloud migration manages services, and Well-Architected Review (WAR). CloudThat  ensures cloud-delivered systems adhere to the security requirements and compliance standards expected by the customers in a multi-cloud environment .  

Among our various global clients,  A  client who offers a data platform for digital publishers approached us to migrate their infrastructure along with data from Google Cloud Platform (GCP) to Amazon Web Services (AWS). Let us dive deep into the details about the customer challenges, migration process, proposed solutions, outcomes, and architectural diagram description.

Customer Background

Our client is a performance data platform  for digital publishers  that helps marquee publishers like  Futbol  Sites/ BolaVIP ,  Carousell , TSM Games/ BlitZ ,  LaOpinion ,  ElDiario , 1Weather, Times Internet –  Gaana ,  InMobi ,  FrontStory ,  SonyLIV , Zee5, Digit & eBay with use cases around analytics & optimization to help them manage & boost their ad-revenues.  They equip their customers with real-time data and insights to manage and accelerate revenue growth.

Customer Challenge

The client’s  requirements were to migrate their Infrastructure along with data from G oogle Cloud  P latform  to AWS .  All the applications and services which belong  to  GCP should be migrated  to AWS .  To meet the increasing customer demand, the client  wanted to migrate their application  running on GCP  to  the AWS  cloud and  manage the  infrastructure  efficiently .   The client required a robust and world-class infrastructure deployed on the AWS cloud platform to mitigate  the major  challenges.  Managing the current AWS resources and creating new resources with standard practices was a significant challenge for the client. The entire engineering process needed to be changed to improve reliability and customer experience.  The focus was on  cost optimization,  fault-tolerant, and HA (highly available) applications hosted on AWS cloud for a successful IT transformation for the client’s business environment.   

Assessment Process Employed

Our client was keen on building a robust cloud migration methodology to improve reliability and performance, operate more securely, optimize costs, and automate security and thus improve the overall security posture.  Their existing used Dataflow for Batch and Streaming jobs where Batch jobs were infrequent running day by day in Dataflow and Streaming job was running for previous 160 days. They inserted data streams during the transformation from Cloud Pub/Sub to Big Query streaming jobs. We assessed and suggested to them to use the service from the Kinesis data family for data streaming and batch jobs.   

They employed BigQuery for querying on 50 TB of their data and for performing streaming inserts coming from Dataflow. And then that data was queried on the basis of business logic required from Big Query and sent to the application.   

Though for BigQuery we have two options Athena or Redshift in AWS as per the processing requirements. Eventually, we zeroed down on Athena as it will be cheaper than Redshift providing cost optimization benefits.

Business Objectives Identified

• By migrating from GCP to AWS cloud, the customer will be able to avail the value benefits of AWS services and have a secure and reliable cloud computing platform  
• Use of AWS Cloud services for their Analytics and Application requirements  
• Reduce data storage cost  
• Optimize the performance of data analytics.

Our Proposed Solution

• Setup of highly available and scalable application for serving the massive traffic with the help of EC2, ALB, CloudFront  
• Setup of WordPress application on AWS LightSail  
• Setup of RDS DB  
• Configure SNS and SQS for all the topics and subscriptions that belong to Google Pub-Sub.  
• Migrated GCS data to AWS S3.  
• Configure Glue Crawlers on S3 to create the databases and tables for Athena.

Role of AWS in the Proposed Solution

We extensively used employed AWS features and services in deploying the solution. Important ones include:  Amazon Athena,  AWS Glue ,  Amazon S3,  Amazon SNS,  Amazon SQS ,  Amazon EC2 ,  AWS Elastic Load Balancing ,  Amazon CloudFront ,  AWS CloudWatch,  Amazon RDS, and,  Amazon QuickSight

The Project Outcomes

• Cost optimization is achieved by minimizing the service bill that was expensive prior to migration    
• The Core Application is Highly Scalable and Available running on an EC2 server with Load balancing and CDN in place  
• We have migrated GCS buckets to Amazon S3 and used AWS Glue and Athena to work seamlessly  
• The client has started using AWS services for their analytics, such as Amazon Athena, AWS Glue   
• The database tables get updated on an hourly basis  
• The Client application querying on S3 using Amazon Athena, thus helping for cost and performance optimization  
• All the data is archived and stored as backup. 

Architecture Diagram and Design Used

• AWS Architecture Diagram and Design

AWS EC2 instances were used to run and serve the application using the public-facing Application Load balancers and CloudFront as a caching layer. Amazon S3 was used for storing static data and serving that data to Glue Crawlers which is then queried by AWS Athena service. Amazon SNS is used as a publisher to send messages according to the required topics and Amazon SQS is used as a subscriber to send and process data as per the requirements by different application services. We employed Amazon QuickSight to provide BI dashboards and analytics.

2. AWS Architecture Diagram

AWS Lambda is employed to run cron tasks on the tables (AWS Athena) which stores the resultant data on S3. Those S3 insights were processed and served using an Application Load balancer with CloudFront caching.

3. Automation of serving Athena tables with data of previous 30 days from S3

• Deleting partition from the tables which are older than 30 days
• Moving the data files that are deleted from the table to different S3 bucket

4. Highly available and Scalable Architecture and Automation of Athena table Updating Process:

• The web layer is exposed to the internet via the CloudFront caching layer and public-facing internal LoadBalancer. Internal applications run on the EC2 server fleets which are highly scalable and highly available.
• AWS EC2: Serving and writing logs data to S3 every hour.
• Lambda function 1 : XYZ-Production-Job.
• Triggered on S3 push event.
• Start Glue Crawlers according to the name of the table.

Automation Architecture Diagram

5. Automation of Table Deletion from the Temp Database

• CloudWatch Event Rule: trigger the Lambda function daily at 11:30
• Lambda function 1: Delete-Temp-Tables
• Delete and recreate the temp database

Serverless Automation for deleting temporary database

Cloud migration involves capital risks, budget issues, disaster recovery strategy, and many other aspects. During the process, the security posture can be vulnerable and unstable which could lead to potential adversaries. It is recommended to choose an expert third-party vendor to manage your data migration requirements.

CloudThat  is Microsoft Gold Partner, AWS Advanced Consulting Partner, and a Google Cloud Partner and has successfully led many migration projects for our esteemed clients. Get in touch with us for quick results. Feel free to drop a comment or any queries that you have regarding cloud migration, and we will get back to you quickly. To get started, go through our  Expert Advisory  page  and  Managed Services Package  that is  CloudThat ’s  offerings. You can easily get in touch with our highly accomplished team of experts to carry out your migration needs.

Learn more about Cloud Migration Methodology and implementation here: 5 Key Cloud Migration Challenges and Their Proven Solutions

Feel free to drop a comment or any queries that you have regarding cloud migration, and we will get back to you quickly.

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Cloud Volumes ONTAP: Cloud Migration Case Studies

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April 25, 2019

Topics: cloud volumes ontap data migration customer case study advanced 7 minute read.

With the vast majority of enterprises already using the public cloud, the new focus of cloud migration strategy has shifted from low-cost and flexible IT infrastructure to leveraging mission-critical apps and workloads in the cloud.

This blog post looks at cloud migration challenges and opportunities and describes three cloud migration case studies using Cloud Volumes ONTAP.

Why Migrate from On-Premises to the Cloud?

What is cloud migration.

The cloud migration process involves moving all or part of an organization’s data, apps, and services from on-premises data centers to a public or private cloud, where they are accessible on-demand over the Internet to authorized users. While some workloads can be transitioned to the cloud as is— also known as a “ lift and shift ” —others may require refactoring.

As an indication of how cloud migration strategy is evolving, research from the Cloud Security Alliance (CSA) shows that almost 70% of organizations are migrating data for their ERP apps from on-premises to the cloud—with 90% of those stating that they consider these apps to be business-critical. And just in case you thought that the cloud migration trend might be reaching a plateau, market analysts are forecasting that, on average, global revenues from cloud migration services will grow by ~22% each year over the next five years.

A key driver for data migration to the cloud is that cloud environments are becoming more diverse, offering enterprises numerous deployment options such as private, public, and hybrid cloud architectures. We have also seen the emergence of robust automation and orchestration platforms that ease the pain of managing even complex cloud infrastructures. Other drivers for cloud migration include:

• Very efficient and cost-effective backup and disaster recovery capabilities.
• High availability for geographically-distributed enterprises as well as for the growing trends of teleworking and mobile device use.
• Reducing operational costs and freeing up IT human resources to fuel business growth initiatives.
• A safer space. The cloud has come to be considered a highly-secure infrastructure.

Cloud Migration Challenges

Cloud adoption and migration, however, are not without challenges. It is important to have a plan in place before the migration takes place in order to avoid issues with:

• Accessibility: It’s not enough to migrate a file share to the cloud. You also have to be able to access files via the same NAS protocols: NFS and SMB /CIFS.
• Interoperability: When migrating a database or other workflow to the cloud, you must take into account its interdependencies with external resources, as well as its network or VLAN topologies.
• Performance and availability: An app’s resource requirements must still be met after migrating its data to the cloud.
• Data protection in the cloud requires a paradigm shift in data governance and access controls.
• Costs: Large-scale data migration can incur hefty bandwidth costs. It also often requires production downtime, which has significant direct and indirect costs.
• An optimal hybrid architecture (what to leave on-premise and what to move to the cloud): The organization must also have the skills and technology to manage a hybrid infrastructure.
• Security vulnerabilities: Organizations sometimes overlook the vulnerability of their data during the transfer from on-premise to the cloud.

Cloud Migration Case Studies

Cloud Volumes ONTAP is an enterprise-grade data management platform that runs as a virtual storage appliance on the AWS and Azure clouds. Leveraging NetApp’s industry-leading data storage and management technologies, Cloud Volumes ONTAP provides a software-defined storage (SDS) solution with single-pane visibility for orchestration across even the most complex hybrid and multicloud infrastructures. Its data replication, backup, and disaster recovery capabilities ensure that the organization’s cloud-based assets are cost-effectively managed and protected against loss or corruption.

What follows are three cloud migration case studies of enterprises that leveraged Cloud Volumes ONTAP for smooth transitions of their data to the cloud.

The Cordant Group

The Cordant Group is a UK company that started in security services and later expanded into facilities management as well as recruitment. With 190+ locations and 5,000+ clients throughout the UK—and growing—the company has an extensive IT infrastructure.

As part of a strategic decision to shift from a CAPEX to an OPEX model, the company had already migrated its infrastructure to a private isolated section on AWS. However, the company found itself restricted to the use of Windows DFS to manage its server resources. Another challenge was related to SQL databases that held business-critical information. As a veteran NetApp customer, they were able to use SnapMirror ® technology to easily replicate data from its physical storage infrastructure to the AWS public cloud and reap the following benefits:

• NetApp Snapshots™ for quick and cost-effective backups in the cloud that complies with a rigorous data restore objective of less than an hour.
• Leverage SnapManager® for SQL for crash-consistent, application-aware backup copies with little or no impact on their storage resources or application performance.
• A robust and cost-effective cloud disaster recovery solution with automatic failover and failback capabilities when things go wrong.
• The ability to provision both NAS and SAN storage, with support and multi-protocol access for SMB/ CIFS, NFS, and iSCSI.
• Single-pane centralized management of their hybrid architecture via NetApp BlueXP Console . 

In short, by migrating and then managing their data with Cloud Volumes ONTAP, the Cordant Group achieved the scalability they needed to grow their business, realized storage efficiencies and cost savings of 40-50%, gained the flexibility of a hybrid architecture, and could rest assured that their data was protected wherever it resided.

Read the full case study here .

AdvancedMD provides a SaaS medical office workflow solution that automates manual front office and billing processes, maintains always-accessible electronic medical and health records, and promotes patient engagement. With AdvancedMD deployed, physicians can focus on improving patient care, with the added bonus of increased revenue because their practice is running more efficiently.

When AdvancedMD was spun off from its parent company, ADP, they had to quickly move all their data out of the ADP data center. As ADP was an existing user of NetApp storage technology in-house, AdvancedMD decided to use Cloud Volumes ONTAP for AWS for moving to the cloud. The key benefits that they gained were:

• Easy lift and shift of their SQL database and their file shares, with no need to change their infrastructure architecture.
• High availability dual-node redundancy for AWS and for Azure to provide minimal downtime in failures or upgrades, a critical requirement when dealing with important healthcare data.
• Storage efficiencies , such as data deduplication, compression, and compaction as well as thin provisioning, automated tiering , and instantaneous data cloning to writable volumes with zero impact on storage footprints.
• The intuitive BlueXP Console interface, with simple lift-and-shift drag-and-drop operations, as well as support for data management automation and orchestration.
• During the migration and afterwards: Enterprise-level data protection and encryption (especially important for sensitive healthcare data, HIPAA regulations) without sacrificing scalability or agility.

Read the customer blog here .

Large Financial Institution

With origins as a government-sponsored institution, today this company is a fully privatized bank that owns nearly one-fifth of the student debt across the United States. Offering more than 500 savings plans and operating across several states, this massive financial institution has annual revenues of ~$1.6 billion and employs 1,500 people nationwide.

The company had made a strategic decision to transition workloads from their on-prem data center to the public cloud. However, they also needed to maintain a consistent Data Fabric across which data could flow seamlessly between their on-prem and public cloud storage resources.

The first task was to replicate more than 50 TB (!) of production WORM (Write Once, Read Many) data to Amazon S3 object storage from their NetApp on-prem storage arrays. They were delighted to see that they could accomplish this quickly and securely using the Cloud Sync automated data synchronization service.

Data migration to the cloud is growing as enterprises embrace the benefits of moving business-critical workloads to the cloud. However, cloud transitions must be carried out with care in order to maintain seamless access to file shares and databases, protect and secure data, and uphold application and database performance SLAs.

NetApp’s Cloud Volumes ONTAP helps enterprises achieve their cloud migration objectives with intuitive lift-and-shift workflows, robust backup and DR solutions, cost-reducing storage efficiencies, and high availability.

For enterprises that use NetApp’s on-prem storage arrays, Cloud Volumes ONTAP also offers automated data synchronization across a single Data Fabric. Download this free guide to cloud migration to find out more.

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CASE STUDY: Cloud Migration

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Cloud Migration Case Study: How Capital One Successfully Transitioned to the Cloud

In the digital age, businesses need to adapt to remain competitive, and a significant part of that adaptation involves embracing new technologies. Capital One, a leading financial institution, stands as a noteworthy example of a company that has capitalized on the transformative power of cloud technology. With this migration, the bank successfully streamlined its operations, improved its services, and enhanced the customer experience.

A Cloud-First Approach

Capital One was among the first banks to embrace a "cloud-first" approach, in part to foster innovation and agility within the organization. The financial behemoth partnered with Amazon Web Services (AWS) for its cloud services, ensuring a robust, reliable, and secure platform for its operations.

The migration was systematic and well-orchestrated. High-priority applications were identified and transitioned to the cloud, focusing on customer-facing systems for optimal impact. The company's mobile banking app and customer account platforms were some of the first to make the leap, demonstrating the firm's commitment to customer-centric digitization.

Efficiency, Scalability, and Cost Savings

Cloud migration provided Capital One with significant advantages. Firstly, operational efficiency saw a substantial boost. The agility of cloud computing allowed for quicker deployment of updates and new features, directly benefiting customers. Scalability, another boon of cloud computing, meant the company could easily adjust its resource usage based on demand, ensuring optimal performance at all times.

The financial aspect was not neglected, either. Shifting to the cloud resulted in tangible cost savings. Capital One was able to reduce its data center footprint from eight in 2014 to zero in 2020, significantly cutting infrastructure and maintenance costs.

Driving Innovation

Perhaps the most transformative impact of Capital One's cloud migration lies in its ability to drive innovation. Cloud-based operations have unlocked new opportunities for the bank, particularly in areas such as machine learning and real-time data processing. By harnessing these technologies, the bank can provide more personalized customer experiences, more precise risk assessments, and improved fraud detection.

Adapting to Change

Despite its size and standing in the banking sector, Capital One's approach to cloud migration provides an important lesson for businesses of all sizes and industries. It underlines the importance of embracing change and leveraging new technologies to improve operations and services.

As technology advances, a company's ability to adapt and leverage these advances becomes increasingly crucial. At Thinklogic, we understand this reality. Our team helps businesses navigate the complexities of digital transformation, whether it's developing custom web-based software applications or facilitating a smooth transition to the cloud. We believe that the right technology solutions can enhance growth and efficiency and are committed to ensuring your business reaps these benefits.

Conclusion: Capital One's Triumph in Cloud Evolution

Capital One's cloud migration journey underscores the transformative potential of cloud technology. By adopting a cloud-first strategy, the bank has not only improved its operations but has also driven innovation and enhanced the customer experience.

Cloud migration may seem like a daunting task, but with the right strategy and the right partners, it can open up a world of opportunities.

Ready to embark on your own transformative digital journey? Reach out to our experts and let's innovate together. Connect with us now at https://www.thinklogic.com/connect.  

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Easing the cloud migration journey

Huawei’s net5.5g converged ip network can improve cloud performance, reliability and security, says the company.

Sponsored Feature The appetite across most vertical sectors for migrating applications and services to the cloud shows no sign of abating. Independent analyst firm Gartner estimates that global spending on public cloud services will hit $679 billion this year.

That figure likely to exceed $1 trillion by 2027. Gartner expects that within the next few years the hosting of applications in the cloud will have moved on from simply being a disruptor of traditional IT to being considered a business necessity when it comes to maintaining competitiveness.

Organisations from worlds as diverse as finance, healthcare, retail, energy, transportation, manufacturing, education and government are all actively investing in cloud thanks to its power to drive innovation, unlock hidden value, create opportunities and boost customer experiences.

But even the best planned cloud migration project is only as good as the network that supports it. Along with cloud's benefits – which include reduced costs, improved availability and scalability of services and greater manageability - come challenges and risks that traditional enterprise networks are not always able resolve.

It's those cloud migration challenges that Huawei's new Net5.5G converged IP network solution is designed to help address. The manufacturer bills it as ideal for organisations in all industries looking to 'accelerate intelligent transformation and maximize digital productivity'. Companies across a variety of industry verticals can rely on the solution to improve the performance, reliability and security of the cloud-hosted applications and services they provide to their end users, says Huawei.

Connectivity issues that puncture the cloud

There's no doubt that poor network quality can affect the impact of a move to digital services. In many cases the deployment of technologies like cloud are not fully translated into digital success on account of network failings, often necessitating that networks are upgraded to the next generation.

Let's consider the challenges around latency, reliability and security in more detail:

Latency : Network latency issues can seriously impact cloud application performance. Just a few milliseconds of delay can significantly degrade end users' experience and productivity, particularly in the case of cloud-based video conferencing and online document editing tools for example. Associated lower data transfer speeds can also cause network bottlenecks for organisations handling large volumes of data.

Reliability : The success of any cloud migration strategy depends in no small part on providing users with consistent, reliable access to the mission critical applications from wherever they happen to be, and regardless of what device they are using. Downtime is effectively death for many digital services – imagine a transport ticketing system which sees unpredictable packet loss regularly disrupting purchases, for example. All cloud infrastructures need some level of fault tolerance to avoid that type of scenario.

Security : Ensuring network security is equally critical given the amount of data which flows in and out of the cloud, as well as the penalties imposed for the loss, theft or corruption of sensitive information. Organisations need to monitor and control who has access to cloud-based resources to help build their own stakeholders trust in the cloud and avoid falling found of data protection regulation. Legacy cyber security solutions built for on-prem environments rarely deliver the protection required, calling for dedicated, cloud native security solutions built for the task.

A solution at hand with Huawei Net5.5G

Designed specifically for the cloud era, the Huawei Net5.5G converged IP network solution is built to deliver the kind of high-quality connectivity that can overcome these challenges and help organisations drive their digital transformation initiatives. At its heart are Huawei NetEngine 8000 series routers which provide an all-service, intelligent routing platform, billed as the most powerful routing solutions on the market. The top of the range features performance of 19.2Tbit/s per slot for example, offering what Huawei says is the industry's largest switching capacity and highest density of ports and allowing users to build simplified and converged ultra-broadband networks with a modest cost of ownership and the lowest possible levels of latency.

These routers combine with Huawei's next generation Network Cloud Engine (NCE) to deliver full-lifecycle automation and proactive Operations and Maintenance (O&M). It's an intent-driven approach which can free organisations from the unnecessary constraints of legacy networking, says the manufacturer.

The solution's support for end-to-end IPsec and SRv6, as well as CGN and BNG functions, is central to its reliability and security. A large number of the wide area networks (WANs) deployed in in sectors that range from government to financial services involve the leasing of third-party links. When data is travelling across these other networks, it needs to be encrypted end to end to ensure security, which is what Huawei says IPsec and SRv6 support guarantees. The company believes that most solutions on the market can't match this capability, because they only support IPsec at the edge.

Network security steps in

Huawei's Network Security Solution is differentiated by three features: rapid threat handling within seconds, industry-leading detection performance, and precise ransomware prevention.

Let's think about why this sort of fast and secure coverage throughout the network layer really matters. Imagine an organisation with widely distributed end points that needs to connect to a fresh distant location at short notice. With end-to-end support for SRv6 and IPsec, it can enable link provisioning in minutes, all while ensuring 100 percent security for its data as it traverses the public network. It can, if it needs to, achieve this at scale, adding thousands of new nodes in short order without compromising the safety of data.

A combination of SRv6 and network slicing, the solution deals with the restrictions of legacy connectivity in other ways. Cross-domain automatic connections can deliver one-hop access to the cloud, while minute-level service provisioning, and both tenant and application-level Service Level Agreements (SLAs) guarantee an improved user experience says Huawei, ensuring smooth evolution away from legacy standards like MPLS. Support for intelligent traffic steering allows for on-demand scheduling of network resources and the configuration of SLAs for different services.

With the technology upgrade, it also can boost throughput for certain applications and services. At the service bearer layer, those slices can be upgraded using a fingerprint solution that allows them to be deployed based on user ID, for example. When it comes to the management layer, Huawei's Network Digital Map 2.0 supports application-level service visualization and optimization, designed to deliver accurate insights into the customer service experience.

Traditional O&M methods can only view the tunnel layer, leading to congestion when multiple applications exist in the same tunnel, says Huawei. But the company's Network Digital Map 2.0 supports application-level service visualization and optimization which can automatically locate and optimize congestion points. This means it can, for example, optimize and adjust video conferences separately, helping customers improve operation quality and experience.

Organisations everywhere are constantly on the lookout for new ways to exploit the cloud's potential to support their digital transformation goals. But as they migrate more and more of their mission-critical applications and services off premise, many find that existing enterprise WANs are just not up to the job. Secure, reliable low latency network links will be the foundation of the digital economy, and Huawei's new Net5.5G converged IP network solution was designed specifically for the task.

Sponsored by Huawei.

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Modernizing payments via cloud migration

Nationwide Building Society migrates its payments capability to Form3 and AWS to improve its customer experience and minimize downtime.

3-minute read

Call for change

Nationwide, the largest building society in the UK with more than £230 billion in group assets, has embarked on a journey to modernize its payments infrastructure and adopt a cloud-native platform. The Society—which processes 450 million retail transactions each year—expects its payments volumes to grow by 20% a year.

With exponential growth in cashless payments and Faster Payments (a UK banking-industry initiative enabling real-time payments) in recent years, Nationwide needed a resilient, cost-efficient solution that would evolve alongside its business. It also wanted to gear up for the New Payments Architecture—an ISO 20022-compliant retail payment infrastructure platform from the UK payments operator and standards body Pay.UK.

The transformation program kicked off in 2018, when Nationwide conducted an in-depth analysis of its requirements and started scanning the market for a solution. After considering a locally hosted installation, it opted instead for a cloud-based account-to-account platform provided by Form3 and subsequently appointed Accenture as the technology consulting partner for the program.

When tech meets human ingenuity

Nationwide selected a new payments system based on the Form3 solution hosted on AWS's multi-tenant cloud. The Form3 account-to-account platform connects financial institutions to payment schemes such as Faster Payments and BACS, and enables them to future-proof operations against regulatory changes such as ISO 20022.

Form3, an Accenture partner that provides an enterprise-grade payment technology platform on the cloud, offers native integration with AWS. This helps to simplify and speed up migration. Accenture and Form3 are collaborating closely throughout this program, building on their well-established partnership.

Drawing on its cloud expertise, Accenture helped Nationwide to review the functional, technical and delivery capabilities required to modernize its payments environment and transition to the cloud. This included building cloud-based development environments and tooling as well as embracing DevOps and agile development principles and practices.

Nationwide worked with Accenture to deliver a minimum viable service (MVS) which enabled the delivery of the first cloud-based payment ‘single-penny transaction’. The MVS was completed within five months in 2022 and involved the integration of Nationwide’s technology stack with Faster Payments and Form3.

A valuable difference

Accenture’s team of experienced payments, data and cloud professionals is working with Nationwide to lay a robust cloud foundation with AWS cloud infrastructure. Nationwide is currently migrating inbound single immediate payments volumes from a near-real-time on-premise platform to the Form3 cloud without impacting live services and scheme settlement.

What caused Dubai floods? Experts cite climate change, not cloud seeding

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