When you decide to migrate to the cloud to enjoy cloud hosting benefits, you have to understand that the transition cannot happen in a day. It is very important to weigh the pros and cons of migration, make a plan to go ahead with migration and then execute the process with a lot of care and strategizing. So, before you start the process of migration, there are some important things to remember:

-- To begin with, you have to completely understand the cloud hosting benefits your business stands to gain. Every method of migration will have its advantages and shortcomings. You can choose to migrate your data and applications using any one of 5 popular methods, namely, re-hosting, refactoring, revising, rebuilding, and replacing.

-- You must then seek to predict exactly how the applications are likely to perform once shifted to the cloud. Most businesses fail to give this process its due importance while there are others that keep guessing this or obtain a rough estimate based upon incomprehensive data. To be able to get the correct idea of how applications will work in the cloud you must have an idea about how these perform in the existing environment and how this is going to translate into their performance in the cloud eventually. When companies do not have access to correct usage and performance metrics it is hard to come up with a correct estimation. In such cases, migrations become very costly for them as they end up over-provisioning resources that they do not need.

-- You must also know costs for applications in the cloud before you decide on migration. So, before moving apps to the cloud, it is necessary to know what your expenses will be for running those apps in the new environment. By doing this you can stop yourself from overshooting your migration budget. Cloud hosting benefits like reserve instance pricing and auto-scaling help to cut down on the costs of every workload. This is why you should ideally undertake a proper analysis prior to migration to get a rough estimate of the costs in advance. This is also useful for identifying the workloads that are likely to be costlier in migration; you can decide to retain them onsite.

-- To go through cloud migration seamlessly, you need to carry out proper planning of the migration process. So, it is important to understand how servers and apps communicate with one another. You have to identify the servers first for mapping application dependencies. It is hard to get 100% accuracy in dependency mapping without using automation tools. Such tools can make agents work to view all web server requests and commands. So, the agents will gather details of application dependencies including how apps communicate with servers and how often they communicate. This information is very useful for migrating apps. You get to identify which apps you will shift first. When you fail to identify the apps and their dependencies, apps get grouped incorrectly and migration takes longer. More number of apps tends to collapse during migration and there are too many de-bugging issues when they reach the cloud.

-- You can enjoy cloud hosting benefits post-migration which takes place after you have correctly understood all the firewall rules. This understanding is a must for every app to identify security groups for them in the cloud. So, firewall rules will help you understand which apps talk on which ports, which ports you must open for outbound and inbound app connectivity.

These are some of the factors which deserve consideration before you go ahead with migration. Cloud hosting benefits are many but to enjoy them, migration must proceed properly. When you choose managed cloud hosting solutions, the provider will take care of complete management and security of the servers. Migration planning is essential because you get to understand which apps have to be rebuilt and which can be migrated as is. Many businesses get to enjoy benefits like cost-savings through auto-scaling. Others may choose to keep many of their apps on-site which work out to be more cost-effective for them.