A brief overview of cloud migration.

For many organization these days, moving to the cloud is inevitable. However, it can be overwhelming for some businesses to completely migrate their traditional workloads to the cloud.

In this quick overview video, I go through how migrating to the cloud works and explains the many benefits that are derived from it.

I look forward to reading your comments and feedback!

Learn more about cloud migration

• Cloud Migration: A Complete Guide
• IBM Cloud: Cloud-Native Journey
• Cloud-Native: A Complete Guide
• Cloud-Native Application Planner
• VIDEO – What is Cloud-Native?
• VIDEO – What are Microservices?
• VIDEO – Kubernetes Explained
• VIDEO – Containerization Explained
• VIDEO – Container Orchestration Explained
• VIDEO – What is Istio?
• VIDEO – What is Knative?
• Full IBM Cloud YouTube lightboarding video playlist here

Video Transcript

What is cloud migration?

Hi, I’m Andrea Crawford with IBM Cloud, and we’re going to talk cloud migration.

Take a look at this picture here. We have enterprise infrastructure—this is typically where a lot of our compute workloads are—bare metal, enterprise core systems mainframe. On-premise data center.

We have private cloud over here, also on-premise, but cloud capabilities in full effect.

And then we have public cloud—this is off-premise cloud capabilities.

Now, many of our enterprises are still struggling to get workloads off of the enterprise infrastructure and onto the cloud.

So, when we migrate enterprise workloads to private or public, we call that migration.

 And this is all about understanding enterprise workloads and their characteristics in terms of whether they should land on-premise cloud or off-premise public cloud.

Modernize

We also have modernize. There could be some workloads over here that we might be able to refactor, if you will. 

Think about a mainframe monolithic code, if we could put some APIs on top of that to expose core business functions, we might be able to modernize functions in a way where those APIs might be able to live here.

Build native/cloud-native

And then we have our third use case—build native. For those workloads that live over here, if we have an opportunity to do things over in a way where we could design cloud-native apps to live either here or here, we would be able to infuse qualities like correlation IDs to track microservices and where traffic flows—we will be able to leverage a lot of the core functions for load balancing and service management here in the clouds.

The benefits of cloud migration

The clouds offer us some core capabilities within the platform so that we can free up some of the logistics and the application layers, so that we can be more innovative, which brings me to the benefits.

Cost-effective

So, moving, migrating, modernizing applications to the cloud is cost-effective.

So, we can lower our costs specifically around public, around OpEx, and being able to let our cloud providers take care of a lot of the management of those workloads.

Scalability

Another benefit is scalability. Because cloud heavily leverages virtualization and the ability to do things like Cloud Foundry and Kubernetes, we can leverage the core services in those particular models, but we also have the flexibility to bare metal and even virtual machines.

Security

Another benefit is security. One of the great things about cloud is we don’t have to worry about a lot of the core services that we would have had to worry about over here. A lot of our cloud providers, nowadays, actually address a lot of the security concerns. Where you have compliance regulation, data concerns, these are services that can be provided here.

Accelerated adoption

We also have as our last benefit, accelerated adoption.

So, by leveraging the services in the cloud like service routing, service discovery, load balancing, we don’t have to worry about that at the application level.

So, we really start to understand why enterprises are really chomping at the bit to move workloads from here to here or here.

And that is cloud migration.