Every business has different needs and will therefore follow a slightly different process for cloud migrations. Cloud providers can help businesses set up their migration process. Most cloud migrations will include these basic steps:
Establish goals: What performance gains does a business hope to see? On what date will legacy infrastructure be deprecated? Establishing goals to measure against helps a business determine if the migration was successful or not.
Create a security strategy: Cloud cybersecurity requires a different approach compared to on-premises security. In the cloud, corporate assets are no longer behind a firewall, and the network perimeter essentially does not exist. Deploying a cloud firewall or a web application firewall may be necessary.
Copy over data: Select a cloud provider, and replicate existing databases. This should be done continually throughout the migration process so that the cloud database remains up-to-date.
Move business intelligence: This could involve refactoring or rewriting code (see below). It can be done piecemeal or all at once.
Switch production from on-premises to cloud: The cloud goes live. The migration is complete.
Some businesses turn off their on-premises infrastructure at the end of these steps, while others may keep legacy systems in place as backup or as part of a hybrid cloud deployment.