Cloud Migration Made Easy: Modernizing Data Infrastructure in the Cloud

Jeff Tao
TDengine

In today's digital world, cloud migration is essential for organizations looking to modernize their data infrastructure. According to Gartner, from 2022, 82% of businesses consider cloud migration an essential part of digital transformation, and by 2025, 51% of IT spending will have shifted from traditional solutions to the public cloud. But the process of migrating to the cloud can be intimidating. It's complex, time-consuming, and sometimes risky, leading to potential data loss or even downtime. As a result, it's crucial to have a plan that mitigates the risks and streamlines the cloud migration process.

Let's discuss some practical solutions for a seamless cloud migration experience. Whether you're a small business or a large enterprise, these tips can help organizations overcome the hurdles of cloud migration to modernize their data infrastructure.

Identify Your Assets and Then Your Strategy

Even though most data is moving to the cloud, not all data belongs there. To begin, you need to analyze your current IT infrastructure, reviewing hardware, software, applications, and data to determine what is suitable to migrate. This analysis should show any risks or constraints on the process.

Once you understand what you have, you can now identify a strategy that works. There are several cloud migration strategies, including:

■ Rehost - moving your IT infrastructure to the cloud without significantly changing the application or data. This is the fastest and most cost-efficient strategy but fails to take advantage of cloud-native features.

■ Refactor - making some modifications to applications and data to make the most of cloud-native features. This approach takes longer and is more expensive than rehosting, but the benefits are significant and it is less disruptive than rearchitecting or rebuilding.

■ Rearchitect - redesigning existing applications and data for the cloud, which can be time-consuming and expensive but positively impacts performance, scalability, and resilience in the long run.

■ Rebuild - re-creating applications and data from scratch for the cloud to take full advantage of cloud-native features and scalability.

Identifying the right cloud migration strategy is critical to success. A comprehensive analysis will allow you to choose the best process based on your organization's needs, budget, and the complexity of applications and data.

Exploring Your Cloud Platform Options

When considering a cloud migration, leaders must make two major platform decisions: choosing the cloud hosting provider and the actual cloud database.

For cloud service providers, it's vital to focus on scalability, automation capabilities, and feature flexibility. Additionally, compare pricing models that align with your business and budget needs, and ensure high availability, disaster recovery, and data redundancy features for reliability. Finally, rank providers with solid security measures, compliance, and standards to protect your data.

Choose a database that can quickly handle large amounts of data, scale up or down as needed, and ensure reliability through high availability, data replication, backup, and recovery features. Depending on your application's requirements, specialized databases like cloud-native time-series databases or graph databases are also worth considering. Also, consider hybrid cloud as an option for the gradual migration of critical on-premise systems.

Consider Cloud Native

Hosting a database in the cloud does not make it cloud-native. To leverage the benefits of cloud-native architecture, you should prioritize purpose-built databases designed for the cloud environment. They can take advantage of the unique benefits of cloud computing, including flexibility, scalability, elasticity, and reliability.

By leveraging cloud-native architectures, businesses can modernize their IT infrastructure and better respond to rapidly changing business needs. This is particularly important for organizations that must stay competitive in a fast-paced market. One of the key benefits of cloud-native is its ability to support agile development practices such as DevOps. By enabling closer collaboration between developers and operations teams, cloud-native architectures allow teams to develop, deploy, and scale applications more quickly and efficiently.

Cloud-native databases can handle high volumes of data with minimal latency, scale up and down based on your needs, and ensure high availability, data replication, and backup and recovery features for reliability.

Optimize Cloud Resources

If you don't use cloud resources efficiently, they can quickly become expensive. Be smarter by using automated resource scaling and cost management tools, and regularly monitor your cloud resources to identify and address any inefficiencies or overspending.

It's important to consider the costs associated with ingress and egress when moving data to and from the cloud. This can quickly add up, especially as your business scales and you need to move more data. To mitigate these costs, ensure that your chosen database can scale as your business does and has efficient data transfer mechanisms. By being mindful of these factors, you can control your cloud migration costs and ensure that your business is utilizing cloud resources most efficiently.

By leveraging the cloud, businesses can achieve cost savings, improve scalability, and access a broader range of tools, applications, and services. While moving to the cloud can be complex, careful planning, preparation, and execution can ensure a successful migration. Businesses should seek out experienced cloud service providers to navigate through the challenges and discuss the benefits of the cloud for them personally. With the right strategy and support, cloud migration can be easy and let leaders unlock the full potential of their data and drive growth and innovation for years to come.

Jeff Tao is CEO of TDengine

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Cloud Migration Made Easy: Modernizing Data Infrastructure in the Cloud

Jeff Tao
TDengine

In today's digital world, cloud migration is essential for organizations looking to modernize their data infrastructure. According to Gartner, from 2022, 82% of businesses consider cloud migration an essential part of digital transformation, and by 2025, 51% of IT spending will have shifted from traditional solutions to the public cloud. But the process of migrating to the cloud can be intimidating. It's complex, time-consuming, and sometimes risky, leading to potential data loss or even downtime. As a result, it's crucial to have a plan that mitigates the risks and streamlines the cloud migration process.

Let's discuss some practical solutions for a seamless cloud migration experience. Whether you're a small business or a large enterprise, these tips can help organizations overcome the hurdles of cloud migration to modernize their data infrastructure.

Identify Your Assets and Then Your Strategy

Even though most data is moving to the cloud, not all data belongs there. To begin, you need to analyze your current IT infrastructure, reviewing hardware, software, applications, and data to determine what is suitable to migrate. This analysis should show any risks or constraints on the process.

Once you understand what you have, you can now identify a strategy that works. There are several cloud migration strategies, including:

■ Rehost - moving your IT infrastructure to the cloud without significantly changing the application or data. This is the fastest and most cost-efficient strategy but fails to take advantage of cloud-native features.

■ Refactor - making some modifications to applications and data to make the most of cloud-native features. This approach takes longer and is more expensive than rehosting, but the benefits are significant and it is less disruptive than rearchitecting or rebuilding.

■ Rearchitect - redesigning existing applications and data for the cloud, which can be time-consuming and expensive but positively impacts performance, scalability, and resilience in the long run.

■ Rebuild - re-creating applications and data from scratch for the cloud to take full advantage of cloud-native features and scalability.

Identifying the right cloud migration strategy is critical to success. A comprehensive analysis will allow you to choose the best process based on your organization's needs, budget, and the complexity of applications and data.

Exploring Your Cloud Platform Options

When considering a cloud migration, leaders must make two major platform decisions: choosing the cloud hosting provider and the actual cloud database.

For cloud service providers, it's vital to focus on scalability, automation capabilities, and feature flexibility. Additionally, compare pricing models that align with your business and budget needs, and ensure high availability, disaster recovery, and data redundancy features for reliability. Finally, rank providers with solid security measures, compliance, and standards to protect your data.

Choose a database that can quickly handle large amounts of data, scale up or down as needed, and ensure reliability through high availability, data replication, backup, and recovery features. Depending on your application's requirements, specialized databases like cloud-native time-series databases or graph databases are also worth considering. Also, consider hybrid cloud as an option for the gradual migration of critical on-premise systems.

Consider Cloud Native

Hosting a database in the cloud does not make it cloud-native. To leverage the benefits of cloud-native architecture, you should prioritize purpose-built databases designed for the cloud environment. They can take advantage of the unique benefits of cloud computing, including flexibility, scalability, elasticity, and reliability.

By leveraging cloud-native architectures, businesses can modernize their IT infrastructure and better respond to rapidly changing business needs. This is particularly important for organizations that must stay competitive in a fast-paced market. One of the key benefits of cloud-native is its ability to support agile development practices such as DevOps. By enabling closer collaboration between developers and operations teams, cloud-native architectures allow teams to develop, deploy, and scale applications more quickly and efficiently.

Cloud-native databases can handle high volumes of data with minimal latency, scale up and down based on your needs, and ensure high availability, data replication, and backup and recovery features for reliability.

Optimize Cloud Resources

If you don't use cloud resources efficiently, they can quickly become expensive. Be smarter by using automated resource scaling and cost management tools, and regularly monitor your cloud resources to identify and address any inefficiencies or overspending.

It's important to consider the costs associated with ingress and egress when moving data to and from the cloud. This can quickly add up, especially as your business scales and you need to move more data. To mitigate these costs, ensure that your chosen database can scale as your business does and has efficient data transfer mechanisms. By being mindful of these factors, you can control your cloud migration costs and ensure that your business is utilizing cloud resources most efficiently.

By leveraging the cloud, businesses can achieve cost savings, improve scalability, and access a broader range of tools, applications, and services. While moving to the cloud can be complex, careful planning, preparation, and execution can ensure a successful migration. Businesses should seek out experienced cloud service providers to navigate through the challenges and discuss the benefits of the cloud for them personally. With the right strategy and support, cloud migration can be easy and let leaders unlock the full potential of their data and drive growth and innovation for years to come.

Jeff Tao is CEO of TDengine

Related Links

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What's the State of AI Costs in 2025?

While companies adopt AI at a record pace, they also face the challenge of finding a smart and scalable way to manage its rapidly growing costs. This requires balancing the massive possibilities inherent in AI with the need to control cloud costs, aim for long-term profitability and optimize spending ...

Bridging the Visibility Gap: A Path to Smarter Telecom Infrastructure

Telecommunications is expanding at an unprecedented pace ... But progress brings complexity. As WanAware's 2025 Telecom Observability Benchmark Report reveals, many operators are discovering that modernization requires more than physical build outs and CapEx — it also demands the tools and insights to manage, secure, and optimize this fast-growing infrastructure in real time ...

Redis Monitoring 101: Key Metrics You Need to Watch

As businesses increasingly rely on high-performance applications to deliver seamless user experiences, the demand for fast, reliable, and scalable data storage systems has never been greater. Redis — an open-source, in-memory data structure store — has emerged as a popular choice for use cases ranging from caching to real-time analytics. But with great performance comes the need for vigilant monitoring ...

Beyond Traditional Autoscaling: The Future of Kubernetes in AI Infrastructure

Kubernetes was not initially designed with AI's vast resource variability in mind, and the rapid rise of AI has exposed Kubernetes limitations, particularly when it comes to cost and resource efficiency. Indeed, AI workloads differ from traditional applications in that they require a staggering amount and variety of compute resources, and their consumption is far less consistent than traditional workloads ... Considering the speed of AI innovation, teams cannot afford to be bogged down by these constant infrastructure concerns. A solution is needed ...

AI Drives Surge in Data Budgets

AI is the catalyst for significant investment in data teams as enterprises require higher-quality data to power their AI applications, according to the State of Analytics Engineering Report from dbt Labs ...

Misaligned Architecture Causes Service Disruptions, High Operational Costs and Security Challenges

Misaligned architecture can lead to business consequences, with 93% of respondents reporting negative outcomes such as service disruptions, high operational costs and security challenges ...

How GenAI Can Save Time for the NetOps Team

A Gartner analyst recently suggested that GenAI tools could create 25% time savings for network operational teams. Where might these time savings come from? How are GenAI tools helping NetOps teams today, and what other tasks might they take on in the future as models continue improving? In general, these savings come from automating or streamlining manual NetOps tasks ...

Will AI Solve the Growing Data Divide?

IT and line-of-business teams are increasingly aligned in their efforts to close the data gap and drive greater collaboration to alleviate IT bottlenecks and offload growing demands on IT teams, according to The 2025 Automation Benchmark Report: Insights from IT Leaders on Enterprise Automation & the Future of AI-Driven Businesses from Jitterbit ...

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A large majority (86%) of data management and AI decision makers cite protecting data privacy as a top concern, with 76% of respondents citing ROI on data privacy and AI initiatives across their organization, according to a new Harris Poll from Collibra ...

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According to Gartner, Inc. the following six trends will shape the future of cloud over the next four years, ultimately resulting in new ways of working that are digital in nature and transformative in impact ...