The Great Migration! (Week 3)

 

The cloud is an interesting topic. It’s more than just a user uploading pictures, documents, extra device storage etc.. Cloud computing has changed the game for not only businesses but users’/consumers. While businesses utilize it to increase flexibility, shifting from physical infrastructure to virtual infrastructure, saving on costs and much more, consumers benefit/interact with it more than we realize. For instance, email, social media, and streaming services all utilize cloud computing, and most users don’t even realize that these things wouldn’t be made possible without it.

While the cloud provides many benefits to both the companies and consumers, what you don’t hear people talk about much is the effort it takes to shift from a legacy infrastructure to the cloud. Cloud migration doesn’t happen overnight, and to help the process, it ideally should be done in phases: Assess, Plan, Migrate, Validate, and Manage. Depending on the company it could take years to complete the shift, or with a smaller company it may only take months. 

To offer some perspective and an example, it took almost 8 years for Netflix to fully shift to the cloud. But, without it… we wouldn’t have the streaming service most of us use today! (https://about.netflix.com/en/news/completing-the-netflix-cloud-migration)