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SaaS applications work nicely on local appliances (on-premises). However, if youre running your SaaS on legacy hardware, youre bound to run into a couple of challenges. And since youre keeping it to your on-premises infrastructure, you cant tap into the features or capabilities of cloud computing. Thats a big disadvantage. So, your go to solution? Migrate SaaS to cloud. Easier said than done though, isnt it?

In this blog post, I take a closer look at:

Yes, were keeping it brief by sticking it to the rule of three.

One of the most common reasons why organizations move their SaaS workloads to the cloud is legacy infrastructure limitations. These include challenges such as:

In order to ensure high availability for critical workloads, you have to resort to expensive setups such as replication-based twin cluster nodes, RAID configuration, etc.

Even with the expensive solutions, its relatively difficult to ensure high availability for important data. Mostly because of single point-of-failure. Twin clustered nodes are great but theyre expensive. And RAID isnt bad either but if you dont replace your hard drives in time, youll still end up losing your data.

In comparison, Cloud Service Providers (CSPs) deploy geo-replication and other similar services to make sure that even if a data center or region goes down, your data remains available.

By putting your data in the cloud, youre able to leverage the availability measures CSPs have put in place so that theyre in compliance with strict SLAs. And youre not paying any additional charges to benefit from them.

On-premises hardware is expensive and it continues to consume budget that could be otherwise redirected for core operations. OpEx for an in-house data center includes maintenance cost, power and cooling costs, and the cost of the space reserved for the hardware appliances; not to mention the salaries for dedicated IT staff.

On the other hand, if you decide to put your SaaS in the cloud, you can opt to build a completely hardware less environment. This is particularly good for businesses that dont have enough space or are looking to save OpEx so that they can focus on core operations.

Now that we know why most organizations migrate their SaaS applications to the cloud, lets see what kind of challenges they have to overcome to do so.

If the SaaS software is a part of your core operations, usually it is, then migration cannot be a disruptive process for you; because that spells downtime and downtime is bad for business.

That implies, youll have to find a way to migrate your SaaS applications without disruption (solutions suggested below see three ways to migrate your SaaS to the cloud).

When migrating any workloads, SaaS applications or VMs, its a challenge to ensure synchronization. Youd want your applications and staff to continue as though nothing happened or simply start off the next day from where they left off.

However, its not easy to do that when migrating from your production environment to cloud-based servers. Secondly, its also important to do regular integrity checks.

Integrity checks simply mean that you have to make sure that the data has not been corrupted during the transfer (migration) and is available for use without any problems.

Depending on the way its done, SaaS migration can be very expensive. And cost considerations are a critical part of any business decision. Verily, moving core SaaS software from on-premises production environment to the cloud is a business decision. Therefore, the consequent cost has to be weighed in.

Best practice is to look for vendors that offer turnkey solutions instead of a component or a couple of components for the migration process.

If IT is not the core of your organization, then its ideal to look for vendors who are also offering professional services along with their solution to help with the setup and guide your onsite IT staff so that they can use the software effectively.

We have journeyed across the reasons why you might want to migrate your SaaS application to the cloud and the consequent challenges youll have to overcome. Now, lets discuss the three ways you can migrate your SaaS application to desired clouds.

If youre running your SaaS application on VMware, then a good option is the vMotion plugin. It automates VM migration and simplifies migration from one VMware environment to another VMware environment.

If youre running your SaaS application on an OS installed on a enterprise NAS storage, then things can be comparatively trickier. However, there are software available to help with server migration too. A good example would be Azure Migrate. It can simplify the migration process if youre looking to migrate your server to Microsoft Azure.

The challenge with these VM migration or server migration applications is that they lead to vendor lock-in. For example, vMotion, despite being quite expensive, will only work for VMware environments. Similarly, Azure migrate is only going to work if youre looking to migrate your servers to Azure.

Secondly, neither of these are turnkey solutions. They are components. In other words, your staff will have to do most of the heavy lifting.

Comparatively, its not a bad idea to look for third party service providers that offer complete data migration services from setup, to transfer, to switch over.

Note: This may or may not be a completely disruption free process. It depends on the chosen vendor. For instance, VMware vMotion promises a disruption free experience.

The second option are data transfer devices or DTDs.

You might be thinking, hey wait! How can that be a disruption free option?

That was true a little while ago but now there are services that leverage DTDs in combination with applications in a way that you dont feel any disruption at all.

For instance, StoneFly does that with their live VM migration DTDs (for VMware environments only).

How these DTDs work is a combination of replication-based synchronization. First, the major bulk of the data is offloaded to the DTDs, then the DTDs are shipped. The data is transferred to the target location and then the recently written data is synced over the wire. Finally, when everything is synced and ready, the system switches over and completes the migration process.

Note: Again, this option too depends on the chosen vendor. Its a good idea to clarify during the early stages that youre looking for a disruption-free process. If the vendor can deliver, they agree to it. If not, then you should look for vendors who can.

This solution is only suitable if you dont have a large bulk of data. For larger data, replication services become expensive, they overload the network, consume compute resources and bandwidth. In other words, everything comes to a grinding halt and this may even take days or weeks depending on the total volume you wish to migrate.

If you dont have a large chunk of virtual data to move, then this isnt a bad idea.

Replication, as the term implies, simply copies your data to the target site. Once the replication is completed, you can switch over and then stop the replication process.

It sounds simple and it is, as long as you choose the right vendor and application for the job.

Theres a good chance that the reason why youre looking to migrate your SaaS application to the cloud is to:

Here are the challenges youll have to overcome to do that:

Here are three effective ways to do it:

Which do you think is the best way to migrate your SaaS application to the cloud? Comment down below and share your expertise.

See more here:
Migrating SaaS to Cloud: How to do it without disruption - Techiexpert.com - TechiExpert.com