Own Your Cloud Migration Journey—Before It Owns You

Migrating to the cloud is called a journey because it’s rarely easy, linear, clear, or done. Business needs can evolve at any time, and your migration strategies may change at various points along the way. Unfortunately, one of the immutable laws of network design is that outages and disruptions happen. They’re a side effect of our internet-connected world. The key to owning your cloud migration is to be proactive in spotting when things aren't going as planned and to have systems in place to quickly restore control.

You’re Not Alone

The cloud migration services market is expected to reach $515.83 billion by 2027. Cloud migration traditionally has been divided into three stages:

• Premigration
• Migration
• Postmigration

It used to begin with business and IT leaders deciding which type of cloud service or services to use, and then transitioning from an on-premises data center or colocation facility and modifying current workloads to fit the cloud. But that’s no longer the case. In addition to making the initial move into the cloud, enterprises may expand further into multicloud or hybrid cloud architectures or even repatriate some of their workloads back on premises.

As network architectures expand, every new device, branch office, or application coming on board only adds to cloud complexity. Companies can select from a variety of models based on their needs, such as software as a service (SaaS) for cloud-hosted applications; infrastructure as a service (IaaS) for cloud-based data storage, servers, and networking; and platform as a service (PaaS) for integrated cloud-based infrastructure. Unfortunately, those models share common blind-spot vulnerabilities. When disruptions occur, databases, files, and apps may become unavailable, preventing your mission-critical services from functioning. You don’t have to look very hard to find examples of this.

And the Cloud Goes Wild

Regardless of the migration project your organization is undertaking today, each project adds a new level of complexity that IT needs to deal with. This is especially true as susceptibility to multiple performance-impacting events threatens those business services migrated to the cloud. That complexity means cloud-delivered services your business thrives on are susceptible to multiple performance-impacting events. For example, an enterprise IT team may have an online storefront with customer-facing microservices hosted on a public cloud, but the back-end systems housing sensitive customer data may be on premises. And each SaaS provider also has its own configurations, hosting, and network architectures.

Performance degradation can be a common side effect of cloud migration. It’s also a great indicator of deeper problems. Keeping an eye on all the transactions running through the network can help you analyze and optimize the delivery of applications and services. Remember, cloud providers mainly deliver the service. Backup and recovery are ultimately your responsibility. You will need to fully anticipate the potential consequences of service disruptions when migrating applications to the cloud and have a remediation strategy in place to mitigate problems that reach customers and users.

See All, Manage All, and Own the Journey

NETSCOUT’s nGenius Enterprise Performance Management provides packet-level visibility of all business transactions from the edge to the core and monitors performance throughout the journey from on premises to the cloud and back again. This not only aids in the analysis and optimization of applications and service delivery but also provides actionable real-time insights around multiple parameters needed to prevent blind spots from impeding swift troubleshooting.

The nGeniusONE solution serves as the cornerstone for NETSCOUT's network and application performance management and end-user experience assurance capabilities. Book a no-obligation demo of nGeniusONE today.