Cloud migrations promise scalability and efficiency, but the journey is not always smooth. In fact, 75% of cloud migrations exceed their planned budgets, with over 25% experiencing cost overruns greater than 20% (Instaclustr). These financial missteps often arise due to poorly planned manual processes, misaligned resources, and reactive decision-making.

That is why cloud migration automation is no longer a “nice to have” but a “must have.” In this blog, we will explain key benefits of cloud migration automation, the steps to implement it effectively, and the most impactful areas to focus your automation efforts. Let’s get started.

What is cloud migration automation?

Cloud automation is the process that businesses use to avoid manual efforts during cloud migration and workload management. The main challenges in manual cloud migration are lack of skills, time constraints, and productivity issues. With cloud automation software, businesses can easily eliminate the manual efforts and use advanced technology for a smoother migration. In simpler terms, cloud migration automation allows businesses to migrate complicated workloads to the cloud without any data loss or downtime.

Benefits of cloud migration automation

Cloud migration automation can bring a lot of benefits to the businesses in terms of reduced efforts and increased resilience. Here are some of the major benefits that automated cloud migration can bring to your business:

1. Reduces manual work and migration time

There are different activities and tasks involved in the cloud migration process. Each task has its own complications and dependencies that may slow down the entire procedure and cause downtime. Automation is the only way to avoid such delays and shift the workload of manual processes for legacy applications. 

2. Decreases migration costs

When cloud migration is performed manually, there are often many tasks that are repeated in the process. Automated cloud migration can help in avoiding such repetitions, which helps in reducing the cost and speeding up the migration procedure.  

3. Prevents business disruption 

The manual cloud migration process often overlooks critical tasks and strategies, which may result in downtime or data loss. To avoid such instances, you can apply automation in cloud migration, as it connects external and internal replications to avoid data loss. These automated solutions are also capable of handling critical apps because of testing and verification, thus reducing the chances of disruption.

4. Increases productivity 

As compared to the traditional cloud migration process, cloud automation helps you to create predictable and well-organised workflows that streamline your migration process. It also helps IT professionals to focus more on strategic tasks like AI and data analytics.

5. Maximises system stability

Data systems are often prone to risks like data breaches, human errors, and natural calamities. By automating backup and replication procedures, organisations can reduce the recovery time, which adds to the system stability.  

Steps to execute cloud migration automation

There are different manual procedures that are automated through cloud application automation. To successfully execute the process, you need to follow these important steps:

1. Cloud analysis and readiness 

You should analyse and assess the current cloud readiness stance of your company as per the available resources and IT infrastructure. This assessment can help in analysing the capabilities of shifting the workload to the cloud. 

Moreover, it will also help in specifying the workloads for critical apps that should be migrated first. This process can be partially automated, but the tools like AWS Migration Hub and the AWS Migration Acceleration Program can be used to make assessment easier in this stage.

2. Plan and design migration 

Many businesses face difficulty in designing and implementing a migration plan because of complexity in workloads, different environments, and infrastructure. So there are tonnes of factors that can be considered at this stage. You can establish a migration goal, prepare environments, and implement DevOps practices to break down the complexity into manageable, automated steps.

With this approach, you can define cost strategies and apply governance to organize all resources early in the cloud application automation process.  

3. Action and building stage 

In this stage, you have to apply the migration plan as per your strategy. When using a cloud automation platform, you can use the automated tools to replicate the business application, metadata, and other information without affecting the functioning of the applications.

While performing cloud based automation, you can use these tools to store the data in cloud native formats before it approaches the deployment stage. 

4. Deployment stage 

Automated orchestration helps in application deployment on cloud platforms like AWS. In this stage, you can also use different tools to test migration strategies for conducting functional & performance tests. 

By strategising the process of workload migration, you can reduce the errors and complexities during automated cloud migration. It will also help in avoiding the technical disruption caused by manual migration processes. 

Key areas for automation in cloud migration

Though cloud automation tools can be implemented in most stages of the cloud migration process, there are instances where automation cannot be performed. Majorly it depends on your migration requirements and application, but in general there are stages where cloud based automation is paired with manual migration processes.

1. Assessment stage 

A cloud automation platform can be used in this stage.

Why: Automation can be used here to quickly collect and analyse application and infrastructure data.

How: Use automated discovery tools to inventory resources, dependencies, and performance metrics.

2. Design and planning stage  

Cloud automation tools cannot be used in this stage.

Why: Automation is limited here due to the need for strategic decisions based on business and technical requirements.

Instead, use manual planning to tailor migration strategies, architecture design, and cost modelling.

3. Building stage  

Automated cloud migration can be implemented in this stage.

Why: Automation is needed in this stage for provisioning resources and configuring environments.

How: Use infrastructure-as-code (IaC) and deployment scripts to build cloud environments at scale.

4. Deploy and testing stage  

Cloud automation can be implemented in this stage.

Why: Automation can be used to ensure rapid, repeatable deployments and efficient testing.

How: Implement CI/CD pipelines and automated testing tools to deploy, validate, and monitor workloads.

How can PatternBots help you with cloud migration automation?

If you are looking to streamline your cloud migration process and reduce manual complexity, PatternBots is here to support you. Our cloud automation experts will work with you to identify the right tools, map out automation opportunities, and implement end-to-end migration strategies tailored to your business.

With years of experience in cloud platforms like AWS, Azure, and Google Cloud, our cloud migration consultant can assist you with planning, automation setup, and seamless execution. Work with us to turn your cloud migration into a well-orchestrated, automation-led success.

Conclusion 

So, if your business is planning a move to the cloud or already facing challenges during migration, automation is worth exploring. It helps reduce costs, saves time, and improves overall efficiency. With the right strategy and tools, cloud migration can be smooth, predictable, and far less disruptive.

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