The Popular Shift of On Premise to Cloud Migration, The Viability on a Cloud to On Premise Migration

The rise in popularity of cloud adoption is certainly nothing new, with the cloud computing market growing rapidly as more and more organizations take up this tech. One overlooked aspect of this popularity is the rising shift of on premise to cloud migration, leaving behind physical machinery in lieu of cloud services. In fact, in their 2023 digital forecast, Google estimated that 32.8% of cloud leaders have migrated on-premise workloads to strictly operate in the cloud.

Companies like Netflix, Apple, and Pinterest have migrated to the cloud from bare metal, but that doesn’t mean that their former infrastructure is completely inefficient. Bare metal infrastructure is something that has been around for ages, and is still extremely viable even today. Depending on the needs and growth of a specific company, moving from convenient cloud services to on premise hardware is the next logical step in an organization’s evolution.

Both on premise and cloud infrastructure are powerful infrastructure options capable of hosting your solutions. At the end of the day, however, your infrastructure choice will largely depend on your solution’s needs, the direction of your organization, and whether you’re even able to make the move from one option to another.

Benefits of Cloud Migration and On Premise Migration

The Case for Cloud Migration

Cloud migration is an increasingly popular practice amongst organizations looking to dip their feet into the cloud. With cloud solutions becoming more and more flexible and convenient, a move to the cloud seems like a no brainer, with some of the other benefits including:

Cost Efficiency

One of the biggest reasons for cloud migration is cost, though to a certain degree.

Many organizations look towards clouds for their performance to cost basis, which pans out well for many larger organizations or startups with low traffic. Initially, cloud costs aren’t extremely inflated, often working well within a company’s budget when they’re trying to establish footing within that cloud. That being said, once organizations scale and store more data within their cloud, costs are capable of rising rapidly, and oftentimes without notice.

Simple Scaling

The convenience of working with a cloud provider extends towards scaling within that cloud. 

Cloud scalability is one of the benchmarks of all clouds, with it being achievable without interruption service. Typically, cloud providers will have all the necessary components to aid your scaling, whether your efforts need more physical hardware and require new virtual resources. Adding more resources to your cloud operation is as simple as contacting an administrator within your provider to add more VMs, making your scaling process that much more streamlined.

The benefits of scaling within a cloud are two-pronged, of course. For one, the costs, speed, and convenience of scaling within a cloud are a huge advantage in itself, removing headaches from the typical scaling process of adding additional bare metal resources. As a result of this quick scaling, organizations are able to become more agile and flexible, meeting workload needs as unexpected traffic spikes occur and creating a foundation for the future.

Operation-Ready Out-of-The-Box

The biggest difference between working with a cloud infrastructure vs on premise is having to deal with physical hardware.

An on premise approach requires you to order machines, find space and talk to a data center, rack them up, and more. And this doesn’t guarantee that infrastructure will be operation ready once everything is set up. For many organizations, this is just too much of a hassle!

Working with a cloud provider removes all of the headache of having to deal with physical machinery, letting organizations to start configuring and launching their infrastructure on day one. In addition, configuring your infrastructure is as easy as contacting an administrator or working within the integrated cloud provider UI.

One of the hardest aspects of cloud migration is moving data. Choosing the right cloud service guarantees that moving your data to the cloud is a headache-free process because of their dedicated cloud experts.

With these being just some of the benefits of on premises to cloud, it’s no wonder why huge companies are making the shift.

The Case for On Premise Migration

While cloud migration touts the benefits of convenience and speed, the on premise approach is one that many organizations still prefer to this day. In an increasingly virtual world, the idea of owning tangible assets is important, with a few of the reasons why on premise migration is still conducted including:

Long Term Cost Management

In 2022, Basecamp – a project management platform – announced that it was formally moving away from cloud after over a decade of service. Why? 37signals, the parent company of Basecamp, found that they spent over $3.2 million on cloud computing alone. The yearly cost of on premise rack space and hardware is $840,000, reducing 37signals’ IT costs by nearly 75%. 

Although working with a cloud is convenient and saves you money initially, the long run negative financial impact of cloud is harrowing, depending on the size of your business. Everything is individualized, a huge mega corporation might enjoy cloud because they can afford the price of convenience, but a medium-sized business might be drowning under the waves of cloud costs. But how can this be?

Many of the costs associated with expensive cloud nightmares are ones that you can’t immediately see increasing. Most hyperscalers charge high prices for services like data storage and egress, things that are bound to grow during your tenure within a cloud. In addition, most of these same hyperscalers can be found charging more for hardware after a certain threshold, driving up costs as your usage increases. There’s a reason why dedicated cloud monitoring tools exists, and why situations like this occur so frequently: 

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When working on premise, you’re responsible for things like hardware, maintenance, storage and spacing, rent and electricity, and more. While this does sound daunting, many data centers offer the ability to rent out machinery, including extra machines needed to scale as your company grows. Renting bare metal machinery removes the worry of maintenance and other critical aspects, while providing all the benefits of bare metal machinery- it’s a win win! 

Lyrid actually offers a way to rent this machinery through a user-friendly interface, letting you tap into global data centers from the comfort of your own home.

Granular Control

At the beginning of your infrastructure operations, fine-tuned control isn’t necessary as long as the costs of your infrastructure work within your budget. For this reason alone, cloud computing can be extremely advantageous. However, once you reach a certain degree of scale, the more control you have over your infrastructure and throughout your tech stack, the better it is for you economically.

As your company grows, you’re bound to use IT services more and generate more data. Working within an on premise solution allows you to bypass many of the hidden fees within a cloud. The granular control on premise hardware offers you also enable a stronger degree of customizability, one that cloud providers can’t offer. From the RAM and CPU to security solutions and degree of scale you wish to achieve, controlling your hardware can positively impact your application performance.

A looming threat within the cloud community is vendor lock, removing the control you have over your tech. The great thing about an on premise approach is that you have the control over your tech stack, but don’t necessarily have to dive deep into customizing just yet. Having the ability to control is leverage towards expanding your tech stack, letting you pick up tech that enables you to have futureproof options instead of being subject to the will of a cloud provider.

Whether your approach towards infrastructure requires cost-effectiveness and simple scaling, or is a long term play and requires giving control back to your company, both on premise and cloud migration are competent options.

Infrastructure Migration Considerations

Whether you’re migrating apps to the cloud or shifting to an on premise approach, migration is a strenuous process and requires time and resources to execute. Depending on the maturity of your business, time and resources might not be expendable, removing migration as an option in itself. For organizations looking to create an on premise or cloud data migration strategy, here a couple things to consider:

Infrastructure Migration is a Highly Individualized Process

What works for one company might be the worst thing for another.

Before attempting to migrate any of your services and data from one location to another, it’s important to understand why you’re migrating and what you need to move. Are costs at one location too high? Do you need more control over your data? How could your app be different in another location? These are just some of the questions you should be asking yourself.

If you’ve decided that migration is the next logical step in your company’s evolution, a good way to go about doing it is by breaking down the services that actually ran inside your business. From internal platforms to mission critical apps, identifying the individual pieces that are actually running can make your migration process more efficient and organized. In essence, migration should be conducted piece by piece to maximize efficiency, moving components with the least impact first to the most impact last.

The Risks of Migrating

Migrating from one location to another requires an overhaul of everything you have and built, including the data generated. Moving compute resources from A to B is easy, data – on the other hand – is a different story. For many companies, moving this data is the hardest part of the cloud migration process, often requiring the most resources to pull off and containing the most risk if done unsuccessfully. Data migration needs downtime and consistency to pull off, with data itself being susceptible to corruption during the process. As your storage grows, be sure to make sure all your data is consistent throughout any moving process

Another risk is the eventual mandatory downtime. Moving the least impactful things to the most impactful things is important to maintain your uptime during this move, with services of lesser impact being able to compensate for performance once higher impact items have to be moved. On premise and cloud migration consulting services can help assess your current situation and identify the pieces that need to be moved, as well as offer migration tactics to ensure high uptime.

The Costs of Migration

Migrating is expensive. From hiring consultants and personnel, to onboarding on premise and cloud migration tools and services, to the sunk cost from down time, on premise and cloud migration costs are not to be taken lightly. 

Cloud Migration Planning with Lyrid

Migrating from on premise to cloud and vice versa is a long process, but one that can drastically change the path of your solution and business. From different cloud migration benefits and on premise benefits, migrating services and data is truly an individual processing, letting you approach your infrastructure and business in a unique fashion.

For many organizations, migration is daunting. The idea of having all of your assets in limbo is scary, especially with petabytes of data being able to disappear in a moment’s notice. And with data being impossible to wrangle, it’s no wonder why some organizations don’t even attempt migration.

With Lyrid, you don’t have to worry about data migration. An underlying problem of data migration is incompetent database management, leading to downtime, data loss, and increased costs if migrated incorrectly. Our team is dedicated to moving your data from cloud services to on premises infrastructure, minimizing your downtime in the process. Our migration process aims to move your data faster than ever, while maintaining strong data security. From streamline migration to reducing your total cost of ownership (TCO) and staying cost effective, we work tirelessly to bring your data and applications into a new age of bare metal Kubernetes.

Are you looking to migrate from your existing cloud to join our network of on premise solutions? If you’re interested, book a call with me! I’d love to chat with you and learn more about your solution and vision for the future! 

Thanks for reading!