Enterprises around the globe are looking to migrate their infrastructure to the cloud. Cloud has become an integral part of IT infrastructure optimization and business development in general. It allows companies to become more flexible, increase operational efficiency, and improve the quality of customer service.
If you are doing business in Russia and provide services to Russian customers, then you should consider moving to the cloud platform of a local cloud provider. Why is this important? Most international companies need to migrate infrastructure to a Russian server in order to comply with local legislation, in particular the law on Personal Data FZ-152. For others, performance and latency matter – when the data center is closer to the customers, they get a better user experience.
Without careful planning cloud migration can result in outages and lost money. In this article, we explain how to prepare for the migration to the Russian cloud and make it successful.
What is cloud migration?
This is the move of the company's own physical IT infrastructure or virtual infrastructure to the cloud provider. Corporate data, IT systems, services, and applications are transferred from the company site to the public cloud. As a rule, the company's area of responsibility includes system management, installation, and configuration of applications.
Why migrate to Russian cloud
Primarily, moving to the cloud is beneficial for companies, which need to be flexible and responsive to changes. Regardless of business size, the cloud helps save time. This is achieved by simplifying the procurement process and eliminating the need for physical installation and setup of equipment. Migration to the cloud makes it possible to focus on business development without spending additional resources on IT management and maintenance.
The cloud provider can handle much of the concerns regarding the technical implementation of migration. Although some tasks will still have to be accomplished by the company itself. First, determine business needs from the transition to the cloud model. What is important to achieve – to increase the speed of corporate services, to improve the reliability of infrastructure, to provide more flexible IT management? Do you need a simple set of virtual machines or additional services? For example, if the company stores and processes the personal data of clients, then the provider must have an infrastructure that meets FZ-152 requirements.
How to choose a Russian cloud provider
When choosing a Russian cloud, evaluate the capabilities of local providers. In Russia, the cloud market is developing rapidly and the quality of services is as good as (and often even better), the ones of giants such as Microsoft, Google, and AWS. Large Russian cloud providers offer customers a wide range of services. Apart from IaaS and SaaS, these services include object storage, disaster recovery, Kubernetes-as-a-service, DDoS protection, etc.
Assess the provider in terms of reliability and security of the data centers where the cloud is located. They must be certified according to the high requirements of the Uptime Institute global standard.
Be sure to focus on technical support. Large cloud vendor’s customers often have to wait long for their questions to be answered. Russian providers offer much better customer service – they specialize in the local market and promptly resolve any technical issue.
It is highly recommended to choose a provider that offers IT-outsourcing services in terms of infrastructure administration and project work. These are so-called managed services.
Systems audit and choosing a migration scheme
The current IT infrastructure must be thoroughly reviewed before moving to the virtual servers in the cloud. Firstly, it is necessary to have an inventory of existing IT services and servers, update the list of software and their current versions, and the level of resource utilization. At this stage, you should have an idea of the amount of computing capacity that will be required in the cloud: the number of virtual processors (vCPUs), the amount of RAM (vRAM), and also to determine the required performance of the disk system.
After that, choose the migration scheme and tools, as well as the type of cloud: public, private or hybrid. There are two migration schemes – full and partial. Full migration involves moving the entire IT infrastructure of the company to the cloud.
Having a system architecture, migration, and backup plan, you can start the migration. At this stage the cloud provider prepares the cloud: allocates the necessary resources, sets up client administrator accesses, etc. A test migration is then carried out. If the test is deemed successful, the planned migration can start. Depending on the complexity of the systems to be migrated and the volume of data, the migration process can take from a few minutes to a month.
Migrating to a cloud environment may seem like a hassle, and there are still a lot of myths about cloud technologies. However, if partnering with a trusted cloud provider cloud infrastructure will bring many benefits.
