How to effectively manage

a cloud migration
Benefits, challenges, and best practices

©2023 Dynatrace
 How to effectively manage a cloud migration

What’s inside
SECTION 1

What is cloud migration?

SECTION 2

Three reasons organizations migrate to the cloud

SECTION 3

Benefits of migrating to the cloud

SECTION 4

What are challenges of moving to the cloud?

SECTION 5

Best practices for a successful cloud migration

SECTION 6

How to effectively manage a cloud migration

©2023 Dynatrace 2
 How to effectively manage a cloud migration

Like any move, a cloud migration requires a lot of planning and

preparation, but it also has the potential to transform the scope,
scale, and efficiency of how you deliver value to your customers.
More organizations than ever are undertaking cloud But what does it take to migrate your existing
migration as digital transformation continues to gain applications to the cloud? We’ll answer that
momentum across every industry in every region. question and explore cloud migration benefits
Cloud services platforms like AWS, Azure, and GCP and best practices for how to go through your
are reshaping how organizations deliver value to their migration smoothly.
customers, making cloud migration an increasingly
attractive option for running applications.

©2023 Dynatrace 3
 How to effectively manage a cloud migration
SECTION 1
What is cloud migration?
Cloud migration is the process of transferring some
or all your data, software, and operations to a cloud-
based computing environment that offers unlimited
scale and high availability. Generally speaking,
cloud migration involves moving from on-premises
infrastructure to cloud-based services. However, it
can also mean migrating from one cloud to another.
In cloud computing environments, infrastructure and
services are maintained by the cloud vendor, allowing
you to focus on how best to serve your customers.
Like any move, a cloud migration requires a lot of
planning and preparation, but it also has the potential
to transform the scope, scale, and efficiency of how
you deliver value to your customers.
For IT teams seeking agility, cost savings, and a faster
on-ramp to innovation, a cloud migration strategy
is critical. Cloud migration enables IT teams to enlist
public cloud infrastructure so an organization can
innovate without getting bogged down in managing
all aspects of IT infrastructure as it scales.
©2023 Dynatrace
But, as resources move off premises, IT teams often
lack visibility into system performance and security
issues. They need ways to monitor infrastructure,
even if it’s no longer on premises. This is especially
true when organizations migrate legacy apps to public
clouds. Traditional monitoring tools cannot monitor
legacy and cloud-native applications on the same
platform.
Thanks to modern observability platforms, cloud
migration has never been easier. Observability
enables organizations to migrate and modernize apps
effectively while enlisting intelligent automation
to monitor their activity. Causal AI automatically
identifies performance problems, security issues, and
more. When combined, observability and causal AI
help remediate issues before they affect users.
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 How to effectively manage a cloud migration
SECTION 2
Three reasons organizations migrate
to the cloud
Organizations migrate to the cloud for a number of
reasons. Here are three.
Accelerate digital transformation
Digital transformation, the process of integrating
digital technology into all areas of a business, is a
foundational change in how modern organizations
deliver value to customers and improve internal
processes. When organizations digitally transform,
they often experience increased profit, higher
customer engagement, and ultimately, the ability to
deliver the best solutions possible to users.
A key step in digital transformation is migrating from
traditional on-prem IT processes to adopting cloud
services. The breadth of fully-featured services, the
pay-as-you-go scalability, and the agility of cloud
platforms enable organizations to expand their
modern approaches to building and managing digital
services in a way they can’t with on-premises apps
and infrastructure. Cloud migration can also be an
opportunity for organizations to embrace green-field
technologies and projects from the ground up. This
can fundamentally transform how they work, make
processes more efficient, and improve the overall
customer experience.
©2023 Dynatrace
Drive business value and avoid
operational cost and risk
Another key driver of cloud migration is an
organization’s desire to increase business value and
avoid operational cost and risk. In the traditional IT
model, there’s significant operational and capital
expenditure involved. It requires purchasing,
powering, and configuring physical hardware, training
and retaining the staff capable of servicing and
securing the machines, operating a data center, and so
on. With this overhead, it can take weeks to set up a
basic project.
A cloud migration strategy, however, provides
technical optimization that’s also firmly rooted in the
business value chain. Migrating to a cloud provider
can alleviate the overhead costs of traditional IT
infrastructure. With cloud-based resources, teams
can spin up infrastructure in seconds, begin testing
immediately, scale up or down as needed, and easily
eliminate resources that are no longer needed. This
flexibility allows organizations to continue delivering
on core value propositions while paying only for what
they use.
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 How to effectively manage a cloud migration

Decrease security risks Many cloud providers offer a shared security model
of data security and compliance in which the cloud
With a constant barrage of companies making
provider bears the responsibility for securing the
negative headlines due to hacks, security breaches,
underlying infrastructure, and the customer is
leaked consumer data, and other security risks,
responsible for the security of their data, code, and
security is a constant concern. With an on-prem
related workloads. In this shared-responsibility model,
data center, the organization bears the burden of
companies can focus their security efforts on their
securing the physical infrastructure and its digital
core business and benefit from more robust overall
assets. Migrating to the cloud is a strategy many
security measures.
organizations pursue to streamline and consolidate
their security efforts.

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 How to effectively manage a cloud migration

SECTION 3

Benefits of migrating to the cloud

Under the traditional data center model, companies
need to invest substantial resources to determine
exactly the right amount of physical infrastructure to
have on hand and maintain it once it’s in place. They
need enough hardware to serve their anticipated
volume and keep things running smoothly without
buying too much or too little.
be reflective of the demand. For example, as traffic
increases, costs will too. But often, increased traffic
also means increased conversions, and as a result,
increased revenue.
Improved performance and availability
The third big advantage of cloud migration is

The flexibility of cloud environments eliminates this performance and availability. A major problem

guesswork. Here are three major benefits of cloud of traditional IT environments is the amount of

migration: downtime – planned or unplanned – which inevitably

Increased scalability
From a scalability perspective, cloud providers offer
computing resources as they are needed, enabling
organizations to scale with demand. In case of a
spike in traffic, you can automatically spin up more
resources, often in a matter of seconds.
Likewise, you can scale down when your application
experiences decreased traffic. This flexible scalability
allows a “Goldilocks” scenario: having the exact right
amount of compute capacity right when you need it.
impacts performance and availability. Compared to
traditional IT environments or data centers, cloud
computing environments perform behind-the-scenes
maintenance, which has made outages a rarity.
Using cloud services, companies can maintain a
variety of distributed services across multiple clouds
in regional data centers across the globe. This can
dramatically decrease network latency and its effect
on the end-user experience. As a result, organizations
are seeing improved availability and performance.

Reduced cost
Cloud providers manage all the underlying hardware,
server maintenance, and security practices, allowing
you to spend less on expensive IT operations and
maintenance.

Additionally, the concept of scalability cloud providers

offer is closely tied to the cost to run your application,
and their pricing follows a pay-as-you-go model. With
cloud computing, your costs will vary based on how
much of the resource or service you utilize.

Therefore, users must remember that although overall

the cost is lower than traditional IT infrastructure,
the cost of cloud computing will always align and

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 How to effectively manage a cloud migration

SECTION 4

What are the challenges of moving

to the cloud?
While there are many cloud migration benefits,
organizations also face some common challenges
during the process. The three biggest roadblocks
are often:
Lack of observability
Because cloud environments are dynamic and
distributed, gaining adequate visibility into them and
the services that run on them is more difficult than
on-prem data centers. To solve this, organizations
need to adopt a comprehensive observability
strategy.
Inconsistent performance
Because cloud architectures are more distributed
and dynamic resources come and go as needed,
performance can be varied. This requires
organizations to architect their systems carefully and
to continuously monitor to quickly detect slowdowns
before they affect users.
The good news is, if you anticipate these challenges
from the outset, you can develop a proactive strategy
that addresses both factors, which will help you avoid
any associated downtime and get the organization up
and running quickly.

Multicloud complexity
Most organizations span between on-prem resources
and the cloud. Many also adopt more than one
cloud platform to meet different needs. As such,
organizations need the ability to integrate and
monitor activity across their hybrid- and multicloud
environments.

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 How to effectively manage a cloud migration

SECTION 5

Best practices for a successful cloud

migration
For an on-premises-to-cloud migration, here are seven best practices to keep in mind for planning and
implementing a seamless migration that meets the desired outcomes.

1. Establish a clear set of goals and outcomes. By establishing these, you can work backward to
ensure every step of the process is designed to serve these outcomes. If not, table it as a nice-to-have
for later.

2. Inventory your technology and service stack and its dependencies. By understanding exactly
what technologies you have, where they run, and what services depend on them, you can determine
their condition and how they’re used so you know how best to upgrade, replace, and plan for their
migration.

3. Analyze your resource consumption and traffic patterns. To understand how best to architect
your cloud environment, you also need to understand how traffic flows across your technology and
service stack. With this understanding, you can streamline and optimize how data is transferred, and
model traffic patterns for migration planning.

4. Migrate databases intelligently. All applications require access to databases, so databases and the
services that depend on them should be migrated in tandem. This is also an opportunity to profile your
database traffic, so you clearly know your database needs in the migrated environment.

5. Migrate by function rather than by resource. This takes a business-driven approach to migration,
for example, moving services closer to users for better response times, or moving an infrequently used
service to an on-demand cloud instance to save on resources.

6. Carefully plan and understand your company’s security strategy as you move to the
cloud. Cloud migrations often involve the transfer of data from one location to another and, like the
transferring of valuables in the physical world, the source, transformation method, and destination must
be secure at every step of the way, as data is especially vulnerable in transit.

7. Ensure you have all the quality checks set up in the new environment. Before deactivating the
old customers and transferring traffic to the new cloud provider, it is important to set aside time to
“break-in” the new environment. Leverage this time t’s kick the tires and ensure everything is working
before leaning on it to support users.

When done correctly, cloud migration is invisible to your customers with no downtime and no new bugs.

©2023 Dynatrace 9
 How to effectively manage a cloud migration

SECTION 6

How Dynatrace simplifies your cloud

migration strategy
Clearly, the process of migrating to the cloud offers numerous benefits, but it also requires careful planning and
the right resources for implementation. Dynatrace provides the tools and capabilities that allow you to execute
your cloud migration strategy smoothly and successfully.

Large-scale cloud migrations are executed in three phases, which vary depending on the cloud provider.
However, the foundational stages are similar:

Assess and discover

• Define the strategy

• Assess the environment

• Perform migration-readiness
assessments and workshop.

Automatically create a complete, interactive dependency map of application

components across the entire stack.

Mobilize and plan

• Build the business case

• Start migration planning

• Define the operating model and

desired operating and security controls

See how users access and interact with the application. Identify key transactions
and business KPIs.

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 How to effectively manage a cloud migration

Migrate and modernize.

• Execute rehost, re-platform, refactor,
and rearchitect through automation
and Agile delivery

• Optimize the cloud migration

• Review the migrated workloads’

performance.

Dynatrace’s dashboarding functionality enables users to compare performance

metrics pre- and post-migration.

Cloud migration is complex, involving people, processes, and technology. But Dynatrace makes it easier
than ever, with automation to discover an environment, identify users’ patterns, plan, migrate, and modernize
cloud workloads.

At the same time, the abstractions that cloud and managed platform solutions offer make it challenging to
identify dependencies, baseline key components, and issues. Dynatrace AI simplifies the process and performs
automated root-cause analysis, even in the most complex applications.

Let’s give your cloud an IQ

Try Dynatrace for free, or get in touch with an expert for a custom demo of the platform.

Try it free Request a demo of Dynatrace

©2023 Dynatrace 11
Dynatrace (NYSE: DT) exists to make the world’s software work perfectly. Our unified software intelligence platform combines broad and deep
observability and continuous runtime application security with the most advanced AIOps to provide answers and intelligent automation from
data at enormous scale. This enables innovators to modernize and automate cloud operations, deliver software faster and more securely, and
ensure flawless digital experiences. That’s why the world’s largest organizations trust Dynatrace® to accelerate digital transformation.

Curious to see how you can simplify your cloud and maximize the impact of your digital teams? Let us show you. Sign up for a free 15-day
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