Cloud Migration

Move existing workloads to the cloud

End-to-end migration — assess, plan, migrate, verify — with both offline and live migration to move your IDC workloads to the cloud without drama.

What's included

Pre-migration assessment & costing
Live/offline migration, minimal downtime
Post-migration tuning
Engineer support throughout

The first step of a migration is not moving data

Inventory first. You need to know how many machines there are, what each one runs, how they call each other, whether anything depends on local hardware — dongles, dedicated lines, specialty appliances — and both the data volume and its real rate of change. Miss this and you discover halfway through that a system depends on an on-prem device, with expensive rework.

Only then can you choose the strategy: lift everything at once, move in waves, or use the migration as a chance to re-architect. Workload and risk rise in that order.

How short can the downtime window be

Offline migration is simplest: stop the service, copy, switch traffic — downtime scales with data volume. Transfer acceleration and shipping physical disks both shorten it.

Live migration seeds a full copy first, then keeps up with incremental replication, and finally stops writes inside the cutover window to catch up the remainder and switch connections. Real downtime is usually minutes; the bottleneck is rarely the transfer itself but whether verification and rollback plans are ready.

After the migration is when the work starts

Moving to the cloud does not make you faster by itself. A database that was locally connected in the IDC now crosses a network, so the latency profile changes; fixed capacity becomes something you have to configure elasticity for; security groups and firewall rules need remapping. Skip these and migration often delivers higher cost and worse performance.

Plan an observation period after cutover and watch a few specific numbers: core API response times, cross-AZ traffic, storage IO behaviour, and the actual bill. One tuning pass grounded in real data beats any pre-migration estimate.

Frequently asked questions

How long does a migration usually take?

It varies widely with the number of systems and how coupled they are. A small, cleanly structured setup can move in days. Migrations spanning dozens of machines, several stateful services, and tangled dependencies typically run from weeks to months — and inventory, verification, and tuning usually consume more time than the data transfer.

What is the best approach for very large datasets?

First work out how long a full transfer takes. If it exceeds a day, shipping physical disks or using a dedicated transfer-acceleration service is usually worth it. Also estimate the change rate: if the delta generated during the full transfer outpaces what the link can catch up, you need batching or a longer sync window.

Does the business have to stop entirely during migration?

In most cases you can get close to zero downtime, stopping writes only briefly inside the final cutover window. Some systems resist this — dependencies on local hardware, single-node databases that cannot replicate incrementally, or migrations combined with re-architecting all need a defined downtime window. Assessing that up front beats improvising later.

Let us talk about your case

Architecture differs a lot by workload — an engineer can help you assess.

Talk to us