What’s Different and the Same When Migrating to Private vs. Public Cloud?

When you hear about cloud migration, it’s often in the context of transitioning from an on-premises environment to the public cloud. However, the public cloud is not always the right destination for some workloads. In some cases, an organization needs a private cloud. Then, it becomes a question of whether migrating to a private cloud can be as easy as migrating to public cloud.

When it comes to migrating workloads to a private cloud, it’s all about the workloads. This is true whether the migration is from an on-premises or colocation environment, or from a public cloud (repatriation). Points to consider about workloads include:

• What are their characteristics?
• What does the optimum target infrastructure to run them on look like in terms of compute, storage and networking configuration? 

The biggest difference between private and public clouds is not that the migration process is vastly different, it’s that the landing zone is different. It’s built differently, provisioned and configured differently, typically paid for differently and legal ownership may be different. It therefore requires a different set of skills, resources and expertise.

Private cloud involves configuring underlying infrastructure resources yourself or on your behalf by a managed services partner such as Rackspace Technology®. Public cloud configuration involves learning about the cloud provider's portal and tools.

The next step is understanding how a migration is executed.

Steps in a typical workload migration

A regular workload migration includes these high-level steps.

Build your migration business case: Understanding your business drivers will have a significant bearing on your planning decisions, including:

• What are your priorities, for example, to reduce costs or to fuel business expansion?
• Are you trying to accelerate the time-to-market of your digital products or is the lease up on the data center and you want to modernize?
• What are the outcomes you expect to achieve?

Other important questions include:

• What is the scope of your migration project?
• Is every application and database being moved?
• What new skills will you need to operate your chosen platform?
• How do the projected operating costs compare with the current situation?
• How will the migration be funded?

Understand your current state: Undertaking a discovery exercise across your existing environment will be a critical component in a successful migration. You’ll want to consider not only the infrastructure running in your data centers, including the number of physical and virtual devices, storage volumes, and databases, but, more importantly, what’s running on it.

Other critical questions about your current state, include:

• What are your most critical business applications and how will you move them safely while minimizing the impact to your users and end customers?
• Will some consolidation and rationalization be required?
• Are your workloads best suited to a public or private cloud platform?
• Will multiple migration approaches be required to accommodate different workloads and operating environments?

The findings from this discovery will inform your initial business case as well as your choice of target platforms and a detailed migration plan.

Choose your platform: This step is more complex than simply choosing which cloud provider to use. Your entire technology stack needs to be considered along with the business impact of any changes that will be made to it. For example, one critical question is, how will your business continuity and disaster recovery plans need to change?

This is also where your business needs to decide on the best environment for each workload. Many established businesses will find they need a combination of public and private clouds. In this case, you need to carefully consider your overall service model, especially the skills and resources that will be required. It’s also a good idea to consider if a service partnership can help you ensure you achieve your goals.

Develop your migration plan: When creating a detailed migration plan, you need to consider each workload separately in terms of how it needs to be migrated and the degree of adaptation (modernization) it requires to work efficiently in your environment. You must consider issues such as

• What are the security and compliance requirements for each workload?
• What is the impact of any architectural changes?
• What skills, resources and timeline are required to conduct the migration?

Proof of concept (pilot migration): Irrespective of all the care and precision taken during the planning stage, everything is theoretical until proven. When you consider that even medium-sized businesses can have 400 applications or more, it’s a good idea to pick one or two of your organization’s less critical applications to migrate first. This will allow all the processes, procedures and tooling involved in the migration to be tested and refined before you embark on the full transition.

Ramp up to migrate at pace: With the migration workflow ironed out, it’s time to line up the applications and databases waiting to be migrated into a pipeline. Rackspace Technology uses a factory approach to migrating each workload through a best-practices workflow, sharing responsibility with an organization’s skilled staff.

Business as usual: Completing a cloud transformation for hundreds of workloads is a huge undertaking for any business. Once completed, it’s time to evaluate its success to determine if the anticipated business outcomes were achieved. Although private cloud costs are more static and predictable than the highly variable costs of a public cloud, it's still important to consider ongoing monitoring, security and capacity management to maximize uptime and performance. This is where a managed service, as offered by Rackspace Technology, can be greatly beneficial because it allows an organization to focus on higher-value projects.

Additional considerations for your migration

Security is a vital consideration with any cloud migration. Ultimately, cloud security is a business’s responsibility. While public clouds include many built-in security features, in a private cloud, security remains 100 percent in the hands of the business. This can add to the complexity of a private cloud landing zone and the ongoing operation of the infrastructure. In this case, a managed hosted private cloud can help ease the burden, while strengthening an organization’s security posture.

Another consideration is data transfer. It could be the case that transferring data from the old environment to the new is different. For example, if the move is from a colocation to a private cloud in the same data center, the data can be electronically transferred with only minor network changes. But if it’s from the same colocation to the nearest hyperscaler (or other private cloud) data center, it might require the installation of new network circuits or in extreme cases, may need to be transferred physically by truck.

Clearly, migrating workloads is a complex and time-consuming exercise. But with a cloud migration partner like Rackspace Technology, it can be completed with minimal disruption to your business. Also, by following the workload migration workflow listed above, the risk of data loss or downtime can be mitigated, and the maintenance of data security can be achieved. 

Read how Rackspace Technology helped the Central and North West London NHS Foundation Trust (CNWL) migrate to both a private and public cloud — so the organization could achieve critical outcomes, including innovation capabilities and cost savings.