Table of Contents

Introducing Synopsys Cloud

Cloud native EDA tools and pre-optimized hardware platforms. Experience unlimited EDA licenses with true pay-per-use on an hourly or per-minute basis.

Migrations to the cloud are rising. If you're considering moving to the cloud, you'll need a solid cloud migration strategy to ensure you capitalize on its full potential.

A cloud migration strategy describes how an organization moves existing on-premises and co-located application workloads and their associated data to the cloud. Most plans include a public cloud migration strategy targeting public cloud providers. 


Cloud Migration Strategy Steps

Here are four steps that will help you successfully migrate to the cloud:

 

1. Planning

Before migrating to the cloud, it is essential to determine the reasons for the migration. Will the cloud be used only for disaster recovery? DevOps? Hosting enterprise workloads? 

At this stage, you must assess your environment and determine what factors will govern the migration, like critical application data, legacy data, and application interoperability. In migrating data to the cloud, you must consider your reliance on that data. Do you need to resync it frequently? Are there compliance regulations? Can non-critical data be migrated quickly? 

By identifying these requirements, you can plan the tools you'll need during migration, identify which data needs to be migrated and when, determine what kind of destination volumes to use, and decide whether the data will need encryption at rest during transit.

You must also consider the time and capital investment in training employees as part of your cloud migration strategy. Because cloud migration involves constant updates, training cannot be a one-time event. 

 

2. Developing a Business Case

Once you've established your plan, you should research cloud service providers and other partners and their pricing.

  • Analyze the expected benefits of cloud migration across three dimensions: operational benefits, cost savings, and architectural improvements.
  • Develop a business case for each application you plan to migrate to the cloud, comparing the expected total cost of ownership (TCO) on the cloud to the current TCO.
  • Use a cloud cost calculator, considering storage requirements, computing resources, operating systems, and specific performance and networking requirements.
  • Identify cost-saving options for your proposed cloud deployment by working with cloud providers. 

Multiple pricing models are available, and providers typically offer deep discounts when you commit to a certain amount of cloud spending or reserve instances for a long time. To understand the long-term cost of your cloud migration, you should factor these discounts into your business plan.

3. Execution

The next step is to execute your migration plan. The main challenge here is to migrate as quickly and efficiently as possible while minimizing disruption to normal operations.

Your business operations may be affected if users cannot access their data during a migration. After the initial migration, you must continue to sync and update your systems. It is imperative that each workload element migrated is tested in the new environment before migrating another.

Once the testing is done, you should use key performance indicators defined during the planning phase to measure success.

During the migration, you'll also need to synchronize changes made to the source data. AWS, Google Cloud, and Azure have built-in tools to assist with cloud migration.

 

4. Monitoring and Ongoing Upkeep 

After moving data to the cloud, it is crucial to ensure that it is optimized, secure, and easily retrievable in the future. You should also monitor for real-time changes to critical infrastructure and to predict workload issues. 

Keep up to date with new cloud features and upgrades. An update cycle should be developed to ensure that your organization fully benefits from the cloud.

To ensure compliance with regulatory data privacy laws, you should also assess and monitor the security of your data

Another consideration to keep in mind is meeting ongoing performance and availability benchmarks to ensure your disaster recovery objectives are achieved.


Synopsys, EDA, and the Cloud

Synopsys is the industry’s largest provider of electronic design automation (EDA) technology used in the design and verification of semiconductor devices, or chips. With Synopsys Cloud, we’re taking EDA to new heights, combining the availability of advanced compute and storage infrastructure with unlimited access to EDA software licenses on-demand so you can focus on what you do best – designing chips, faster. Delivering cloud-native EDA tools and pre-optimized hardware platforms, an extremely flexible business model, and a modern customer experience, Synopsys has reimagined the future of chip design on the cloud, without disrupting proven workflows.

 

Take a Test Drive!

Synopsys technology drives innovations that change how people work and play using high-performance silicon chips. Let Synopsys power your innovation journey with cloud-based EDA tools. Sign up to try Synopsys Cloud for free!


About The Author

Venkata Ravella is Vice President of Information Technology at Synopsys, where he leads a world-class IT infrastructure team that has built large-scale engineering and business infrastructure on private and public clouds. Over the last 25+ years, he has held various roles in IT, with the majority of his time focused on engineering environment and infrastructure. He has in-depth experience building high-performing engineering environments, both on-prem and in-cloud, with an emphasis on reliability, scalability, and security at their core.

Continue Reading