Cloud Migration Services Made Easy: Network Architecture Considerations
There is no standard blueprint for moving your organization’s network, business, and operational functions to a cloud environment. Under the scope of cloud migration services, the best method is to approach migration and integration systematically. And along the way are several key considerations.
One of the first is choosing and adopting the “right” cloud architecture. Your new cloud environment should ensure the continued use of existing applications, access to databases and back-office systems, and so on. In between are things like assessing an application architecture for compatibility and applying proper load balancing on your network. Other issues can be IP and network settings and standardizing your networks for data and wireless.
Working with a qualified cloud services provider to get a head start on your migration planning makes details like these less daunting.
We’ve created a checklist of Network Architecture Considerations to help you get started. Download the checklist here.
Adopt the right cloud architecture
A cloud infrastructure and hosting environment should ensure availability, application flexibility, scalability, and data redundancy. As part of your migration, your cloud provider can (re)engineer the cloud architecture as needed to support these capabilities.
Assess your application architecture
To optimize the new cloud platform, assess its application architecture for compatibility to your existing architecture. Ensuring compatibility lets you know that migrating your applications to a new cloud environment is the right decision.
Ensure networking and connectivity
The objective is secure connectivity between your cloud resources and users and systems. Make sure your network topology is designed to isolate resources between application tiers, database tiers, and load balancing for security and management.
Apply proper load balancing
To access internal endpoints and Internet-facing endpoints, your cloud provider may set up load balancers on your network. Private load balancers serve internal network traffic, while public load balancers serve traffic from the Internet.
Update IP and network settings
Some data centers use separate virtual local area networks (VLANS) for admin and production, leaving insufficient resiliency for cloud migration. Have your cloud provider assign a new IP address in the cloud data center to “clean up” the existing networking IP.
Consider network bandwidth and latency
During migration, additional network bandwidth is needed between the source and target environment. The capacity amount depends on the planned move groups, schedule, amount of data, and the migration strategy: one-time data copy or continuous replication.
Standardize networks for data and wireless
If moving from legacy voice systems to VoIP, have your cloud provider measure the impact of calls traversing the wide area network (WAN). Sizing local and wide area networks appropriately for voice readiness is critical to migration success.
Are you migrating production apps?
Moving production applications to the cloud requires potentially re-architecting the application space plus associated processes. Your cloud provider may recommend a cloud-only approach, or a hybrid solution. that accounts for all IT environment factors.
Download the other three checklists in this series below:
