A Beginner’s

Guide to
Cloud Migration:
The Why and The How

In This Guide
3 Introduction
4 Part 1: An Introduction to Cloud Migration
8 Part 2: The Major Advantages of Cloud Migration
15 Part 3: The Five Steps to a Successful
Cloud Migration
25 Part 4: Qumulo the Rescue!
27 Conclusion
Businesses everywhere are adopting cloud as a strategic necessity. Despite the ravages of the
Covid-19 pandemic, Gartner estimated that cloud spending still grew 6.3 percent in 2020 over
2019, to over $250 Billion USD. Further, IDC has estimated that 60 percent of all IT spending
- and a higher percentage of software spend - is cloud-based already. Factor in an estimated
post-pandemic growth rate of 17.5 percent and IT spend will continue to move to the cloud
at the cost of on-premises spending. As cloud adoption becomes the defining industry trend
of the 20s, to better understand the factors driving so many enterprises to migrate to cloud,
three topics must be covered: 1) the inherent agility of cloud, 2) the cost savings unlocked by
migration, and 3) next-generation workloads that make on-prem unworkable.

This guide was developed by Qumulo Inc. to help IT leaders and administrators understand
why migration to the cloud is necessary and to develop a game plan on moving your most
strategic workloads off-premises. At the conclusion of reading this guide, you will see that while
cloud migration can be a major initiative the benefits far exceed the hassle.

Let’s begin with the simplest question: what is cloud migration and
why is it such a trend in IT?

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Part 1
An Introduction
to Cloud Migration
Cloud Migration is just as it sounds - the moving of one (or more) workloads from an
on-premises data center into an infrastructure as a service (IaaS) provider, such as the ‘Big Four’
of AWS, Azure, Google Cloud Platform and Alibaba. Increasingly, companies are choosing to
begin or continue their journey, and many are desiring to be out of the data center altogether.
This movement is especially pronounced in relatively early-stage startups, but even major
Fortune 100 companies are following the trend for reasons we detail below.

Across every industry, general IT trends are pushing cloud adoption at a time when the massive
rise in consumable and actionable data is pushing data centers to the limit. According to
Statista, 59 zetabytes (59,000 exabytes or 59 billion terabytes) of data were created, captured,
copied and consumed worldwide in 2020, and that number is expected to grow to 149 ZB
in 2024. As more data is consumed, on-premises storage of said data becomes both more
expensive and challenging to maintain; that is, more hardware, servers, admins, square footage,
electricity, and investment are required to keep everything on-premises. With cloud computing
more advantageous and less expensive in the long-run, keeping everything on-premises is not
an ideal solution as we will detail below.

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