Moving to the cloud makes sense to a lot of companies — it’s getting there that can be difficult.
GitLab’s 2023 Global DevSecOps Survey showed that migrating to the cloud can help organizations release software faster: Respondents who were running at least 25% of their applications in the cloud were twice as likely to release software faster than they were a year ago.
However, the migration, whether to a single-cloud service or a multi-cloud environment, can be a big lift. IT teams are tasked with securing major data stores and workloads, navigating the complexities of moving legacy applications, and ensuring that cloud environments comply with applicable data regulations and laws. It can be complicated, with a lot of moving pieces that are often difficult to track.
And the longer a migration drags on, the more things can go wrong and the more expensive it can get. It only makes sense to look for a way to make something so critical to the business easier, faster, and less expensive.
Abubakar Siddiq Ango, developer evangelism program manager at GitLab, and Fatima Sarah Khalid, developer evangelist at GitLab, share five ways organizations can alleviate some of the time-consuming, repetitive, and arduous tasks it takes to successfully make that move.
1. Take care of your data
One of the most difficult parts of a cloud migration is moving the data itself – especially if it’s complex and stored across multiple systems – but there are a few ways you can organize and streamline the tasks involved to make them more straightforward. For example, to save time and increase efficiency, Khalid notes that team members can create issues, break tasks down into milestones, and use the Roadmap feature, which gives teams a more granular view of their workflow.
2. Avoid security pitfalls
Security should be a key consideration in any cloud migration. Moving to a cloud environment can inadvertently cause misconfigured servers, unsecure APIs, compliance infringements, and data loss. Any of these problems can trip up cloud migration efforts and expose the company to risk.
To ensure the move to the cloud proceeds smoothly while minimizing security risks, Ango says teams can use container and dependency scanning and static application security testing (SAST) to identify and remediate known vulnerabilities in container images, dependencies, and source code. Teams also can use features such as code quality analysis to supplement existing code review processes and ensure that the project’s code is simple, high-quality, and straightforward to maintain — and, therefore, less likely to cause issues during the migration.
3. Automate compliance
Compliance is another critical issue. IT teams need to ensure the new cloud environment continues to meet all of the organization's regulatory requirements — a potentially large number of standards. That means making sure processes and safeguards focused on data protection are in place and cover the information and applications being moved to the cloud. Manually, that can involve spreadsheets, seemingly endless checklists, and cross-functional teams of people culling through data. Automation makes this more streamlined, requires far fewer people to navigate the process, and is simpler to manage. Automated DevOps practices, like security scanning, policy automation, and making compliance standards part of the CI/CD pipeline, all act as guardrails to keep an organization’s compliance needs on track. With these tools at hand, team members can trust that when they create compliance frameworks and policies, the associated rules will be automatically deployed and enforced throughout the software development lifecycle.
4. Relieve configuration challenges
Setting up and configuring a cloud platform can be a time-consuming and complicated job, but CI/CD capabilities help automate the configuration process, says Ango. With CI templates, teams can build and deploy applications to different cloud providers or installation targets without having to write their own CI script every time. For instance, Auto DevOps, a collection of pre-configured features and integrations, uses CI/CD templates to handle deployments on each different cloud environment.
The GitLab agent for Kubernetes also can offer integration capabilities for different cloud providers and services. The agent, which helps set up GitOps, automatically deploys workloads to Kubernetes clusters. Any time new changes are made, it pulls them in and deploys them into a cluster. Also, teams can use GitLab and Terraform for infrastructure as code, removing the complexities of making configuration changes repeatable, traceable, and more scalable, which is essential for cloud environments.
5. Go multi-cloud
While some companies are making initial moves to the cloud, others are expanding from a single cloud to a multi-cloud environment. This strategy enables organizations to run different workloads on different cloud platforms. Being cloud agnostic means they can use the same development tools and internal processes, and then choose where they want to have their workloads run based on their business needs. Problems can arise, though, when IT teams turn to vendor-locked, cloud native developer tools, which are tailored to their own services and might, or might not, support other cloud environments. Using different tools for each cloud platform isn’t efficient, so it’s key to find tools that are cloud or provider agnostic.
Uncomplicate cloud migration with a DevSecOps platform
Yes, there are different ways to ease a cloud migration – but do teams have to go out and round up a dozen different tools to ensure their migration is fast, secure, and compliant? No, they don't.
“A lot of teams are realizing that having a single, unified place to simplify, automate, and manage the process of setting up or migrating to the cloud is a game changer,” says Khalid. “With an end-to-end DevSecOps platform, users are able to deploy to any of the common public clouds; support collaboration through features like merge requests, code reviews, and issue tracking; support integrations with a variety of third-party tools; and have built-in security features that allow teams to meet their needs.”
Taking advantage of the GitLab DevSecOps Platform can uncomplicate a lot of those adoption challenges. And GitLab works with any cloud provider.
“I know when people think about the GitLab platform, they focus on security, source code management, and collaboration. But we also really should be thinking about how it’s a tool that helps organizations get their workload to the cloud,” says Ango. “You have to be able to work fast, move fast and deploy fast on whatever cloud environment you need, and do it all securely. That is what GitLab offers. That is a big deal.”
To find the features — all in one place — that your organization needs to ease and speed a cloud migration, check out this free trial of GitLab Ultimate.
