8 Best AWS Cloud Migration Tools to Overcome Migration Challenges

In this article, you will learn:

• Why you should migrate to AWS Cloud
• StormIT cloud migration services
• Cloud migration challenges and how to solve them
• Useful tools for migration to AWS

Before learning about some useful AWS migration tools and services, it’s important to answer the question of why you should consider migration to AWS Cloud and learn about AWS Cloud migration challenges.

Why migrate to AWS?

Businesses of all sizes are being drawn to the cloud for a range of reasons. By migrating to AWS Cloud, organizations will be able to focus on business innovation instead of concentrating on maintaining their complex IT infrastructures.

While every organization is going to have its unique motivations, there are four typical drivers for migrating current solutions to the AWS Cloud:

• User agility and control: The number one reason customers choose to move to the cloud is for the agility they gain. The AWS Cloud provides more than 200 services including everything from computing, storage, and databases, to continuous integration, data analytics, and artificial intelligence. With AWS, you can simply start hundreds of servers in minutes as opposed to the ten to 18 weeks it typically takes to start servers used on-premises.
• Flexibility and scalability: Cloud computing allows businesses the flexibility to scale their IT resources up or down to meet sudden spikes in demand or unpredictable needs.
• Cost savings: Cloud computing can lower your TCO (Total Cost of Ownership) because every AWS service is designed so that you only pay for what you use. A lot of potential customers of the cloud don’t know what to add to the real TCO of their current solution. We can help you with estimates of your current TCO.
• Security and compliance: This is the highest priority for AWS. As an AWS user, you will leverage a network architecture and data centers built to meet the highest security requirements. You can use AWS security tools to monitor, control, and protect the information that is flowing into and out of your cloud resources.

AWS has long been a leader in this industry, offering all of the above benefits while adding new functions every year. It’s therefore good to look at what AWS is offering, especially as a recent whitepaper by IDC showed that customers who migrate to AWS can experience 51% reduced costs of operations, 62% increased IT staff productivity and 94% reductions in downtime.

StormIT services related to cloud migration

StormIT offers control over the whole migration process and AWS consultancy for its every step.

• Cloud Migration, Modernization, and Transformation: Readiness assessment, business outcomes identification, selection of an appropriate migration plan, evaluation of your specific migration needs.
• Architecture design: Design and deployment of high availability architectures, thorough assessment and security planning, non-disruptive to your business.
• Cloud Foundation: AWS Cloud Adoption Framework principles, tailor-made workshops, best practices guidance.
• Cost Optimization and Enterprise Cloud Management Platform: 24/7 monitoring for under-utilized assets, senior AWS Solution Architect consultancy, Cloudcheckr platform access.

You can read more about our cloud migration process and related services here:

Cloud migration challenges and solutions

There are some cloud migration challenges that companies will often have to solve. The actual solution is always very specific to the case. But a lot of problems can be solved by working with an AWS Consulting partner with the knowledge and experience needed for a successful migration to the AWS Cloud.

Cost management

The costs of the process are connected to almost every part of the migration.

The parts of the process with the highest costs are:

• Rewriting/rebuilding application in the AWS
• Investing in people and tools needed to migrate successfully
• Training staff on the new systems
• Performance issues including latency, dependencies on on-premise apps, and business interruptions
• Bandwidth and data transfer costs

Solutions lie in the evaluating, analysing and planning of the whole process, and the StormIT team can help you with every step of your journey.

There is also the possibility to use two specific approaches:

• Choose a gradual migration process: This approach has the advantage of breaking down what can be financially overwhelming into more manageable pieces over time.
• Start with hybrid cloud: Full cloud migration may not always be the best option, because it can be very difficult and cost demanding to migrate some applications quickly and without disruption to your business. To begin with, you could choose to only use some of the services of the AWS Cloud. For instance, storage services for backups are always a good start.

Other challenges and our solutions to them:

Legacy applications and what to do with them

Not every application can be moved easily. Which do you keep and which do you rebuild in the AWS environment and how?

StormIT helps you identify the right AWS services and to implement the right solution. We will answer your questions regarding how to migrate applications and which (if any) applications it is not possible to migrate.

Modernization of applications

What are your options for rebuilding applications so they perform optimally in AWS?

StormIT helps you identify the AWS cloud-native services which you can use from the start, whether you should rebuild your whole architecture and if you can modernize in the future.

Cloud management

Once you have moved your applications, what’s the best way, and who are the best people to manage them? Do you have enough knowledge to be able to manage everything yourself?

StormIT offers Cloud Foundation services to those who need to learn how to properly use AWS Cloud themselves so they can make the most of every opportunity it offers. We are also able to manage everything for you, so you can focus on your main business goals.

Complexity of migration

Understand the complexity you’ll face when migrating and appropriately estimate the effort to get it done. Do you have the right plan for the whole process?

StormIT plans the whole migration process for you, so you don’t have to learn about the complexity of migrating to the cloud and the effort required for the process.

Dependencies

Resolve dependencies of infrastructure and applications by identifying connections between every component helping you reduce risk, time, and cost.

StormIT identifies everything in your IT infrastructure and learns about the dependencies of your applications.

Learn more by reading our blog post: Cloud Migration Strategy With StormIT

List of 8 best AWS migration tools for cloud migration

Over the years AWS has created services and tools you can use for migration to AWS Cloud to help you simplify the process. These services and tools can help you overcome some common challenges while other services are multifunctional, helping you with the whole process; some solutions can for instance simply collect information about your current progress or help you find third-party software you can use for migration.

Most important AWS Cloud migration tools and services for the first phase of the migration which can help with the whole process:

Migration tool n.1: AWS Migration Hub

The AWS Migration Hub is not a basic tool for helping with migration: it’s more of an application in the AWS Management Console that can monitor other tools used for migration and which also provides a single place to discover your existing servers, plan migrations, and track the status of each application migration. You can view the status of the servers and databases that you are migrating.

Some of the tools integrated into AWS Migration Hub are described later in this article, but in general, they can be divided according to their usage:

• Discovery tools: AWS Discovery Connectors, AWS Discovery Agents
• AWS Migration tools: AWS Database Migration Service(DMS), AWS Server Migration Service(SMS), CloudEndure Migration
• AWS migration programs: Professional Services, Migration Acceleration Program, Migration Partners Solutions

Migration tool n.2: AWS Cloud Adoption Readiness Tool (CART)

With CART you can transform your idea of moving to the cloud into a detailed plan that follows AWS best practices.

If you choose to use this tool, at first you will take an online survey and an assessment report which details your cloud migration readiness including information about your business, people, process, operations, and security. After you complete this survey, you can download a customized cloud migration assessment that describes your readiness and what you can do to improve it.

You can find an example of a readiness assessment report here.

AWS Cloud migration tools and services for the second phase:

Migration tool n.3: AWS Application Discovery Services

The AWS Application Discovery Services help companies in the discovery and gathering of information about their on-premise solutions by identifying servers hosted in data centers. It collects server specification information (CPU & RAM utilization and disk I/O), and details of running processes and network communications between servers. After the discovery of your on-premise servers, you can export this data to a CSV file and use it to estimate the Total Cost of Ownership (TCO) of running on AWS.

Migration tool n.4: AWS Control Tower

Formerly named AWS Landing Zone, the AWS Control Tower is intended for organizations that need to easily set up multiple accounts environments and assign these accounts to the right team in the organization structure. Control Tower will help you get started quickly with governance and best practices built-in.

Best AWS data migration tools and services for the final migration phase:

Migration tool n.5: AWS Marketplace

AWS Marketplace is a digital catalog with thousands of software listings from independent software vendors. It includes popular categories such as security, networking, storage, machine learning, business intelligence, and databases. Users can quickly launch pre-configured software with just a few clicks, and choose software solutions in Amazon Machine Images (AMIs), software as a service (SaaS), AWS CloudFormation, and other formats. The product can be free or it can have an associated charge. Every software product on AWS Marketplace has been through a curation process.

Migration tool n.6: VMware Cloud on AWS (VMC)

VMC is useful for those who want to find a way to use VMware in the AWS cloud and leverage the benefits of the public cloud, such as scalability and cost savings.

VMC on AWS allows you to quickly relocate hundreds of applications virtualized on vSphere to the AWS Cloud in just days and to maintain consistent operations with your VMware environments. You can easily use any of the AWS services, but you can also leverage your knowledge of VMware.

Migration tool n.7: AWS Database Migration Service (DMS)

The most popular data migration tool is DMS, which helps you migrate your current databases to the AWS Cloud reliably, quickly, and securely. The source database remains fully operational during the migration, minimizing downtime.

Some of the features of DMS:

• Continuous Data Replication: Perform continuous data replication between an on-premise solution and AWS.
• Homogeneous Database Migrations: Homogeneous database migration means that the source and target database engines are the same or are compatible like Oracle to Amazon RDS for Oracle, MySQL to Amazon Aurora, etc.
• Heterogeneous Database Migrations: In heterogeneous database migrations the source and target databases engines are different, like in the case of Oracle to Amazon Aurora, Oracle to PostgreSQL, etc.

Migration tool n.8: AWS Server Migration Service (AWS SMS)

This service migrates on-premises servers to AWS. AWS SMS incrementally replicates your server VMs (VMware vSphere, Microsoft Hyper-V/SCVMM, and Azure virtual machines) as Amazon Machine Images (AMIs), making them ready for deployment on Amazon EC2 (AWS virtual machines).

Benefits of using AWS SMS:

• Simplify the migration process: With just a few clicks in the AWS Management Console, you can begin migrating a group of servers. AWS SMS manages the whole migration process.
• Supports most commonly used operating systems: You can simply start the replication of operating system images containing Windows and Linux distributions.
• Leverage the minimized downtime: Replication is incremental and minimizes the business impact.

There are more services and tools to help migrate to AWS Cloud, but this was the condensed list of the most useful.

Do you need help with migration to the cloud or do you have any questions regarding AWS tools and services for migration?