A Quick Guide to Cloud Migration

What Is Cloud Migration: Definition, Benefits, and Process

Cloud migration has become a foundational strategy for modern IT, driven by the increasing need for agility, scalability, and resilience in database infrastructure and application environments. This transition often involves evaluating existing processes, managing workloads across environments, and selecting the right migration strategy for long-term success.

As organizations pursue digital transformation, traditional on premises data centers can limit their ability to adjust to changing business demands. Cloud migration enables businesses to move their data, applications, and workloads – including distributed databases – to cloud platforms. This unlocks new and different cloud resources and improves operational flexibility. By leveraging cloud capabilities, businesses can more effectively scale operations, handle spikes in demand, and meet regional compliance goals.

Cloud computing enables enterprises to scale their infrastructure on demand, ensuring optimal performance during peak use periods, while controlling costs during quieter times.

Global access to services and data becomes straightforward, supporting remote workforces, expanding into new regions, and delivering a consistent user experience, regardless of where customers are located. The cloud also simplifies disaster recovery, enhances compliance capabilities, and introduces advanced automation for maintenance tasks.

What is Cloud Migration?

Cloud migration refers to the process of moving digital assets from on-premises infrastructure to a cloud-based environment, including:

data
applications
workloads

This encompasses public, private, and hybrid cloud platforms. The aim is to enhance operational capabilities, improve business agility, and reduce vendor lock-in by leveraging the extensive resources and flexibility of cloud computing environments. The shift away from legacy systems also allows IT teams to eliminate inefficient background processes that once consumed unnecessary system resources.

What are the Benefits of Cloud Migration?

Cloud migration offers unparalleled scalability. This enables organizations to rapidly adjust computing resources to meet fluctuating demand without substantial capital expenditures.

By shifting from traditional hardware investments to a pay-as-you-go model, operational expenses can be closely aligned with usage patterns, decreasing the total cost of ownership while streamlining budgeting processes.

Cloud environments also foster flexibility by allowing seamless deployment of applications across multiple regions. This supports business continuity and rapid disaster recovery.

Many companies also see a reduction in unplanned downtime.

For organizations operating globally, the cloud provides the infrastructure necessary to store data within specific geographic regions, a crucial factor in meeting regulatory standards such as the European Union’s General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR). The cloud’s distributed nature enables IT architects to quickly adapt architectures to meet regulatory needs while maintaining performance and data resilience.

How Can You Address IT Infrastructure Challenges Through Cloud Migration?

The transition to the cloud addresses persistent infrastructure challenges by:

unifying tools
streamlining management processes
automating many manual operations

Many legacy environments lack visibility into every process running, which cloud platforms expose through integrated monitoring tools. Modern cloud migration strategies optimize resource allocation, facilitate regulatory compliance, and ensure data protection across varied geographical regions.

Enterprises can build robust business continuity plans and quickly adapt to remote or distributed working models, capabilities that have proven essential in recent years.

For IT professionals and database architects, leveraging the cloud is not just about cost efficiency or scalability. It’s about building a resilient data foundation that can keep pace with business evolution, while providing seamless access, strong security, and reliable performance.

What Are the Main Types of Cloud Migration?

The primary types of cloud migration include rehosting, replatforming, refactoring, retiring, retaining, repurchasing, and relocating. Let’s take a closer look at each of these cloud migration types.

Rehosting

Also known as “lift and shift,” this migration method involves transferring workloads with minimal modification. Enterprises typically rehost entire applications (along with their databases) from on-premise environments to the cloud. The advantage is speed and simplicity, as modifications to application code are often unnecessary. However, this approach may not fully leverage cloud-native features such as auto-scaling or distributed high availability. Some rehosting strategies even require minor adjustments via tools like the command line to update configurations or integrations.

Replatforming

Replatforming maintains most of the core architecture and code while optimizing specific aspects of the application or database for cloud deployment. For example, migrating a relational database to a managed service or updating middleware components to take advantage of cloud services. This approach strikes a balance between ease of migration and benefits like improved operational management and cost controls.

Refactoring

Refactoring, also known as re-architecting, means fundamentally redesigning the application and data infrastructure to fully utilize cloud-native capabilities. This may involve converting monolithic databases into microservices or adopting technologies like distributed SQL databases (like YugabyteDB) to support global scale, strong consistency, and platform agnosticism. Refactoring demands significant investment but offers flexibility, robustness, and optimization for cloud-native operations.

Retiring

Retiring refers to removing applications prior to migration. This method is often used when current applications aren’t compatible with the new cloud-based environment. After retiring an application, it’s important to find a cloud-based replacement.

Retaining

Retaining refers to postponing the migration of certain applications. This is done when there is no significant benefit to migrating an application immediately, or when the application can only be used with a system that hasn’t been migrated yet.

Repurchasing

Repurchasing involves replacing an application with a new, cloud-based version. This is done when the current software is no longer useful or is significantly inferior to a cloud-based alternative.

Relocating

Relocating refers to migrating entire workloads into a cloud provider’s infrastructure without making modifications. This strategy reduces migration risk and cost because it does not involve complex restructuring.

How To Choose The Right Cloud Migration Type?

Selecting the right migration type depends on many factors, including:

existing application architecture
business continuity requirements
regulatory constraints
required post-migration benefits

Enterprises aiming for agility and scalability often opt for refactoring or replatforming with distributed SQL databases. Those that need rapid migration may prefer lift and shift, with future plans to optimize further.

Ultimately, success hinges on aligning your migration strategy to your business goals and technical roadmap.

What is the Cloud Migration Process?

The cloud migration process includes carefully coordinated steps that organizations follow to transfer applications, workloads, and databases from on-premises environments to cloud platforms. During these steps, it’s vital to identify and manage all background processes that could interfere with data consistency or cause downtime. The aim is to achieve scalability, efficiency, and flexibility, while ensuring minimal disruption and maximum data consistency.

A structured approach is critical, as cloud migrations involve technical, business, and compliance considerations that differ based on the size and complexity of the existing infrastructure.

Let’s take a look at each step of the cloud migration process.

Assessment: Evaluating Current Infrastructure and Workloads

The first phase of any successful cloud migration process is assessment. IT teams must conduct a thorough inventory of the current technology landscape, including servers, storage, applications, and, in particular, databases.

This step identifies application interdependencies, performance needs, security requirements, and any legacy systems that may present migration challenges. An accurate assessment forms the foundation for an informed migration plan and risk management strategy.

Planning: Defining Migration Goals, Timelines, and Scope

Once the assessment is complete, planning begins. This step involves defining key business and technical objectives for migration, such as reducing operational costs, improving resiliency, or enabling global access.

The plan should include a timeline, resource allocation, and clear roles and responsibilities across teams. Migration planning requires you develop a roadmap with milestones, taking into account potential downtimes, user impact, and critical compliance checkpoints.

Migration Testing: Proof of Concept

It’s important to test the migration feasibility using a limited set of workloads or data. Completing this step allows teams to validate the cloud platform and chosen migration approach, reducing risk before scaling up.

Database Migration Execution: Data Consistency, Downtime, and Compliance

During execution, workloads and data are gradually moved to the cloud environment. This may involve phased migrations, using replication tools, or bulk data transfer.

Database migration requires additional attention. Ensuring data consistency is paramount, especially for transactional systems. Organizations must plan for minimal downtime and define procedures for data backup, replication, and validation.

Security measures and regulatory compliance must be incorporated from the outset, ensuring that sensitive data is handled in accordance with industry standards and regional laws.

Application Migration Execution: Adjustments and Moving to the Cloud

Application migration adapts applications for the cloud according to the selected migration strategy (rehost, replatform, refactor, etc.). This may require integration testing and adjustments to support cloud-native features.

Validation: Continuous Testing

Validation rigorously tests workloads and data in the cloud to ensure that performance, compliance, data integrity, and security controls are maintained in the new environment. Automated testing frameworks are valuable in accelerating and standardizing this phase. Frequent communication with stakeholders helps manage expectations and address issues as they arise.

Optimization: Monitoring and Continuous Improvement

After the migration, the focus shifts to optimization. Continuous monitoring for performance, availability, and cost management is essential. Application workloads should be tuned for the cloud environment, and further automation opportunities explored to simplify operations. Ongoing optimization leads to improved outcomes and sustained return on investment.

What Are the Benefits of Cloud Migration?

Companies that modernize their database infrastructure by migrating to the cloud often report improvements in system performance, resilience, and scalability, as well as cost efficiency gains.

Consider the use case of a leading financial services provider transitioning a legacy relational database system to a distributed SQL solution across public cloud regions. By migrating to a distributed cloud-native environment, the organization achieved always-on availability, enabling continuous operations even during regional cloud disruptions. This move allowed them to address regulatory compliance across multiple geographies by deploying data across specific cloud regions while maintaining a unified application experience.

How Do Multi-Cloud Migration Scenarios Address Regional and Regulatory Needs?

Multi-cloud strategies are common among industries with demanding regulatory or regional requirements. For example, a multinational retail enterprise adopted a multi-cloud approach to satisfy data residency laws and provide low-latency services to customers worldwide. By distributing their database workloads across multiple cloud providers, the firm successfully balanced compliance obligations with the need for high availability and rapid failover. The result was enhanced business continuity and more robust disaster recovery capabilities.

Distributed SQL Databases and Cloud Migration

Distributed SQL databases transform the migration landscape by enabling applications to function across clouds and regions without rearchitecting core logic. These databases provide strong consistency, ultra resilience, and built-in support for multi-region deployments, ensuring always-on availability even during transitional migrations.

How Does Adopting Distributed SQL Databases Support Cloud Migration?

Adopting distributed SQL databases significantly enhances the cloud migration journey by providing strong data consistency, flexible deployment options across clouds, and robust resilience against outages or failures.

Solutions like YugabyteDB Voyager enable an organization to move applications and workloads with minimal friction between cloud environments, whether public, private, hybrid, or multi-cloud, removing the traditional barriers presented by legacy, monolithic databases.

This agility is crucial for enterprises seeking to meet the growing demands for scale, uptime, and regulatory compliance across multiple geographies.

How Do Distributed SQL Solutions Simplify Application and Data Mobility Across Environments?

Traditional relational databases often anchor applications to specific infrastructure, making migrations complex and risky. In contrast, distributed SQL solutions introduce a unified data layer that appears as a single logical database, even when spanning several regions and clouds.

This abstraction allows applications to be redeployed or scaled in new environments without extensive rewrites or migration downtime. Features like geo-partitioning, automatic sharding, and native replication streamline both the migration process and ongoing operations, minimizing administrative burden and risk.

What Impact Does Distributed SQL Have on Scaling and Availability During Cloud Migration?

The stateless, horizontally scalable nature of distributed SQL databases ensures that infrastructure grows and contracts in line with actual workload demand, eliminating the limitations of single-node systems.

Scalability can occur in real-time, matching dynamic business needs, while maintaining transactional consistency globally. With continuous availability and automated recovery from node or region failures, YugabyteDB and other distributed SQL databases help deliver near-zero downtime, an essential requirement for mission-critical workloads during and after migration.

Cloud Migration Success with YugabyteDB

Cloud migration is a cornerstone strategy for enterprises aiming to achieve agility, cost savings, and competitive differentiation in the digital era. By transitioning from legacy, monolithic systems to cloud-based platforms, organizations can unlock immense potential, supporting rapid innovation, robust resilience, and substantial scalability.

This transition not only addresses the evolving expectations for performance and uptime but also lays the groundwork for future growth and flexibility. A critical takeaway from modern cloud migration journeys is the growing importance of distributed SQL technologies, like YugabyteDB.

Distributed SQL databases future-proof IT infrastructure, providing a database foundation capable of withstanding the complexities of multi-cloud, hybrid cloud, and geographically distributed workloads.

Distributed SQL databases deliver strong consistency, high availability, and seamless scaling capabilities, ensuring performance remains uncompromised even as infrastructure evolves. This modern database architecture helps eliminate legacy silos, streamline compliance efforts, and support application portability across regions and providers.

By enabling linear scaling, built-in fault tolerance, and region-aware deployment, YugabyteDB ensures your infrastructure adapts dynamically to business demands. These features are essential for supporting always-on operations, meeting global customer requirements, and withstanding site-level failures without data loss or downtime.

With native support for cloud-native patterns, distributed SQL solutions provide an extensible foundation that adapts as strategic priorities evolve, future-proofing your investments.