Welcome to this week’s edition of CloudBolt’s Weekly CloudNews!
Maybe cloud migration needs more than six Rs
David Lithicum, InfoWorld, Jan. 11, 2022
“The six Rs of cloud migration (retire, retain, replace, rehost, re-platform, and refactor), have been a staple for many years. I’m not sure where they came from, but you’ll find them listed in one form or another on many cloud migration project slides. The reason for the six Rs is simple. We have workloads, which are typically applications and coupled data not running on a cloud, and we’re looking to place them into categories as to what will be done with them in the future, in the cloud or not. Here’s the short explanation of the six Rs:
- Retire: Remove a workload entirely or end of life it.
- Retain: Keep it where it is.
- Replace: Find SaaS systems or other analogs for the workload.
- Rehost: Lift and shift it, or just move it to the cloud with few or no modifications. For example, move from Linux on premises to Linux in the cloud. I see this differently than refactoring, in that we’re just changing an application so it runs well on a cloud platform and not specifically leveraging cloud-native services.
- Re-platform: If we can’t find platform analogs on the target cloud, we move to a new platform, such as Linux to Windows. Sometimes new databases and other platforms change as well. Thus, the workload needs to be modified to accommodate the new platform, but we’re not leveraging cloud-native services.
- Refactor: Heavily modify (re-code) the workloads to take advantage of cloud-native features such as cloud security, governance, monitoring, auditing, etc.”
How cloud content migration leads to digital transformation
Jordan Jones, TechTarget, Jan. 11, 2022
“Amid the COVID-19 pandemic, organizations adopted the cloud to enable remote work, speeding up digital transformation adoption by three to four years, according to a McKinsey & Company report.
As organizations migrate to cloud environments, they must prepare for potential issues along the way. Key challenges include resistance to change and costs. Resistance to change. People often resist change to daily routines and workflows. To mitigate employee resistance, organizations should carefully craft change management plans. Careful migration planning, like preparing many small migrations instead of one major migration, can help build employee acceptance. Organizations may also struggle to find the right balance of change. Cloud migration should correct problems but not make unnecessary changes. Workflow changes should complement how employees work and help increase productivity. Costs. Organizations may also struggle to calculate costs for cloud migrations. Some costs to evaluate include outdated hardware maintenance and manual workflows. Organizations can compare these costs to a cloud environment’s potential benefits, which may justify the investment.”
5 top hybrid cloud security challenges
Bob Violino, CSO Online, Jan. 10, 2022
“As companies deploy more public cloud services and add private cloud capabilities, their IT environments are becoming much more complex from a management and security standpoint. Without taking steps to monitor usage of the services, they lose visibility of what’s going on in this environment.
‘A hybrid environment naturally introduces more complexity; there are just so many more ‘windows and doors’ to lock, and more security maintenance—patching, etc.—to perform,” says Chris Kanaracus, research director for dedicated and hybrid cloud infrastructure/services at research firm International Data Corp. (IDC). ‘We have seen so many high-profile media stories about data leaks caused by human error [such as] misconfigured storage buckets on public clouds.’”
