Enterprises want to take advantage of cloud’s many values, including greater flexibility, scalability, cost savings, and agility. However, migration is a complex and often disruptive process, requiring changes in organizational processes, workflows, and skill sets. Careful planning and the right tools can make your cloud migration a smoother and safer journey.
Prepare for Common Migration Challenges
While some migrations may only require lifting and shifting apps to the cloud with minimal changes, the process is frequently more complex and requires a number of cloud migration steps to navigate the obstacles. For example, many applications have dependencies on other applications, services, databases, or infrastructure components—forcing an app refactor, which can be difficult, costly, and time-consuming.
Mapping all the relationships across apps, hardware, and networking devices for each IT service is notoriously difficult. Nearly half of survey respondents said understanding app dependencies is the top cloud migration challenge.1
Another challenge is prioritizing which apps should be migrated to the cloud and when. This requires determining whether you leave apps on-premises, retire them, potentially replace them with a SaaS solution, or migrate them to the cloud.
Finally, security and compliance risks are also a top barrier to cloud migration.2 Often, cloud requires different security tools, creating inconsistency. Sensitive data may also be subject to additional regulations and controls that must be accounted for prior to migration.
Ease Your Cloud Migration Journey
F5 and Amazon Web Services (AWS) can help you migrate to the cloud safely and securely wherever you are in your cloud journey. Start with the AWS Migration Evaluator Tool to help build your migration business case. It can also map your server and application dependencies to help determine your migration strategy and prioritization.
The F5 Journeys BIG-IP Upgrade and Migration Utility also makes it easier for current F5 BIG-IP customers to migrate applications to the cloud. The utility adds automation to the migration process by modifying and upgrading configurations from an existing BIG-IP device to be compatible with the software running on a target instance, such as BIG-IP Virtual Edition (VE) on AWS. This lets you migrate applications to AWS while retaining the same level of security, reliability, and scalability you already know.
F5 Solutions Built for Secure AWS Operations
F5 provides networking and security solutions that complement and extend AWS native security capabilities, giving you complete flexibility to meet unique application performance, security, and compliance requirements. These solutions integrate seamlessly with cloud provider services, such as AWS Gateway Load Balancer and AWS Global Accelerator. Leveraging these integrations can simplify the configuration and management of load balancing, security, and other functionality during migrations.
F5 accelerates migration to the cloud by removing security concerns. With offerings that can be deployed on-premises and in the cloud, F5 allows you to maintain consistent security controls and policies across hybrid and multi-cloud environments. F5 BIG-IP Advanced Web Application Firewall (WAF) offers protection against malicious bots, application layer denial-of-service attacks, OWASP Top Ten threats, and API attacks to protect applications and data on-premises or in the cloud.
Get cloud-native security solutions with F5 Distributed Cloud Services. These SaaS solutions, available via the AWS Marketplace, include online fraud prevention, WAF, API security, bot defense, and DDoS protection in the cloud. If you use the AWS WAF, F5 also offers pre-built rules to extend its protection capabilities. F5 and AWS together provide a secure environment for your data and applications.
Reduce Cloud Complexity and Increase Security Control with F5
F5 management tools provide a centralized and intuitive interface to manage and configure F5 solutions within AWS. They enable administrators to easily deploy, monitor, and automate the management of application delivery and security tools to reduce complexity in hybrid or multi-cloud environments.
The combination of F5 and AWS reduces migration challenges with convenient tools and robust security. Together, they deliver a portfolio of services that work across the entire hybrid cloud estate, leading to accelerated cloud migrations and increased security that let you take advantage of the full value of cloud computing.
Explore this link to learn more about F5 solutions on AWS Marketplace.
Sources:
1 2023 State of the Cloud Report, Flexera, April 2023
2 The race to cloud: Reaching the inflection point to long sought value, Accenture, January 2023
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