We know that during the COVID-19 pandemic, many companies are trying to speed up cloud migration because employees are working from home. Organizations want to leverage cloud services to provide the tools, services, and infrastructure needed to provide remote work for their employees. To use cloud services, often have to be migrated to the cloud, or from on-prem to cloud, or from one cloud provider to another cloud provider.

As a result, cloud-based service providers are inundated with migration requests. Migration often serves as the first point of travel in the cloud. Migration may sound simple, but it can be very complicated.

According to Mark Kirstein, Vice President, Products at BitTitan, the market for cloud-to-cloud migration is growing rapidly. “We continue to see double-digit growth. We continue to observe the movement between Office 365 and G Suite going both ways, with Office 365 ahead of G Suite and attracting 2:1 users.”

“Migrate mailboxes first to ensure corporate communications remain intact. From there, determine which teams, groups, or other workloads also need to be migrated,” he advises. MSPs need to know the peak schedule to ensure that they implement a window migration project which will help ensure fast execution and smooth migration efficiency.

What are the challenges of cloud-to-cloud migration?

The challenge is that each cloud platform is based on its unique and customized architecture and most of them are not compatible enough to migrate their applications to another cloud. That means that if you’ve built an app for Azure, you’ll need to run it on the Microsoft platform, and then, when you decide to move it to Google Cloud, you probably have a lot of software to write for the new cloud platform.

Suppose your system runs on a popular cloud platform like Azure, which is considered a top choice platform because of its cost. But if you suddenly decide to move to Google Cloud Suite for your remote workers, it will be a challenging task. Migrating from cloud to cloud is just as difficult as migrating to cloud.

The strategy of multiple clouds is very complex and can affect business processes and therefore companies need special assistance. Managing multi-cloud SLAs can be difficult because each cloud provider has its own terms of use. In addition, there is a general lack of standardization between cloud providers, which can be a headache.

With all cloud migrations, it’s hard to find people with the right knowledge and skills to streamline the migration. This is where the right automation tools can come in handy. For example, cloud and on-premises migrations can be fully automated with SaaS tools, eliminating the need for manual methods to avoid downtime and minimize errors. 

What can be done to meet the challenges?

Adapting to a new cloud environment can be problematic and requires adapting and reconfiguring applications. What does a company do if it already has its data in the cloud, but wants to migrate it to another cloud provider?

First of all, you may need to contact your cloud migration service provider who will then require an in-depth analysis of your needs. You need to determine the safest way to migrate workloads without affecting your business or data. In addition, IT administrators should be familiar with the new cloud management and maintenance tools.

Here it is important to determine the size of the project and when to migrate. Then it is important to determine the system components to be migrated. It’s also important to recognize potential challenges because things can go wrong. Before you start the migration, organize all your backups.

Several SaaS applications on the market can support cloud-to-cloud migration without affecting enterprise applications or data. Migrating applications, data, and servers between multiple cloud providers requires careful planning and methods. Before doing this, you need to consider the costs, business risks, and migration partners.

Organizations may also consider deploying a multi-cloud management platform that operates across both cloud provider networks. With multi-cloud managers, enterprises can easily move loads and migrate data.