Historically, cloud migration usually meant moving on-premises workloads to a public cloud, like Amazon Web Services (AWS) or Microsoft Azure. And because so many businesses were keen to get out of the on-prem infrastructure management business by moving to public cloud, there were plenty of guides and tools to help with an on-prem to public cloud migration.
But now that about half of enterprises have workloads in the public cloud, moving applications and data from on-prem server rooms or private data centers into a public cloud environment is no longer the crux of many cloud migration strategies. Instead, businesses are facing a new challenge: How to move workloads from one public cloud to another.
Unfortunately, because cloud-to-cloud migration is a more novel type of use case for many companies, fewer resources are available to help guide the process. While cloud providers offer some tools (like Azure Migrate, which can move AWS-based server instances into Azure, and AWS Server Migration Service, which can move them in the opposite direction) that can migrate certain types of objects between clouds, they often don’t address issues like reconfiguring complex networking setups or the need to move hundreds of terabytes’ worth of data over network connections that offer limited bandwidth. And few guides to cloud migration offer best practices on how to perform a cloud-to-cloud migration.
