Cloud Migration from On-Premise & Application Modernization
Moving from on-premise infrastructure to the cloud — and modernizing legacy applications along the way — is one of the most impactful investments an organization can make. NextInfo Inc. guides businesses through every stage of this journey: from initial discovery and planning, through migration execution, to post-migration optimization and ongoing cloud-native development. We bring deep expertise across AWS, Microsoft Azure, and Google Cloud Platform, combined with proven application modernization patterns that reduce cost, improve resilience, and accelerate time to market.
Migration Strategy: The 7 Rs Framework
1. Rehost (Lift & Shift) — Move applications to the cloud with no code changes using automated migration tools. The fastest path to the cloud — ideal for meeting deadlines, escaping expiring hardware, or reducing on-premise costs quickly. Typical savings of 20–30% on infrastructure costs from day one.
2. Replatform (Lift & Reshape) — Make targeted optimizations during migration — such as switching to a managed database service (RDS, Azure SQL, Cloud SQL) or moving to a managed container runtime — without changing core application architecture. Achieves better performance and lower operational overhead with minimal risk.
3. Repurchase (Drop & Shop) — Replace legacy on-premise software with a SaaS equivalent (e.g., moving from on-premise CRM to Salesforce, or on-premise email to Microsoft 365). Eliminates infrastructure maintenance and accelerates modernization through vendor-managed updates.
4. Refactor / Re-architect — Redesign and rebuild applications to take full advantage of cloud-native capabilities: microservices, serverless functions, event-driven architecture, and managed services. Highest upfront investment but delivers maximum long-term scalability, resilience, and developer velocity.
5. Relocate — Move infrastructure to the cloud at the hypervisor level (VMware Cloud on AWS, Azure VMware Solution, Google VMware Engine) without converting to cloud-native. Preserves existing VMware investments while gaining cloud elasticity and global reach.
6. Retain — Keep specific workloads on-premise where cloud migration is not yet justified due to latency, regulatory, or technical constraints. We help you build a hybrid architecture that connects on-premise systems securely to cloud workloads via VPN, Direct Connect, or ExpressRoute.
7. Retire — Identify and decommission redundant, outdated, or duplicate applications during the migration assessment phase — typically 10–20% of an application portfolio can be retired, immediately reducing licensing, support, and operational costs.
Cloud Migration Tooling & Platforms
8. AWS Migration Hub & Application Migration Service (MGN) — AWS's flagship migration tracking and server replication service. Provides real-time migration status, automated replication from on-premise to AWS, and non-disruptive cutover testing.
9. AWS Database Migration Service (DMS) — Migrate Oracle, SQL Server, MySQL, PostgreSQL, MongoDB, and other databases to AWS with minimal downtime. Supports homogeneous and heterogeneous migrations including schema conversion via the AWS Schema Conversion Tool (SCT).
10. Azure Migrate — Microsoft's unified migration platform covering assessment, dependency analysis, server migration (Hyper-V, VMware, physical), database migration, and web app migration — all managed from a single dashboard with cost estimates and right-sizing recommendations.
11. Azure Database Migration Service — Online and offline migrations of SQL Server, Oracle, MySQL, PostgreSQL, and MongoDB to Azure-managed database services with near-zero downtime for production systems.
12. Google Cloud Migrate (Migrate to VMs / Migrate to Containers) — GCP's automated migration tooling for moving VMware, physical, AWS, and Azure workloads to Compute Engine or GKE, with optional automated containerization of existing applications.
13. CloudEndure / Carbonite Migrate — Agent-based, continuous block-level replication for lift-and-shift migrations of physical, virtual, and cloud servers with sub-second RPO and minutes RTO during cutover.
14. Zerto & Veeam — Enterprise disaster recovery and migration solutions supporting replication from on-premise VMware/Hyper-V environments to AWS, Azure, GCP, and co-location facilities.
Application Modernization Patterns
15. Monolith to Microservices Decomposition — Apply Domain-Driven Design (DDD) and the Strangler Fig pattern to incrementally extract bounded contexts from legacy monolithic applications into independently deployable microservices — reducing deployment risk and enabling team autonomy at scale.
16. Containerization with Docker — Package existing applications and their dependencies into portable Docker containers, standardizing runtime environments across development, testing, and production and enabling seamless deployment to any cloud or on-premise Kubernetes cluster.
17. Kubernetes Orchestration (EKS / AKS / GKE) — Deploy, scale, and manage containerized workloads on managed Kubernetes services. We handle cluster design, node group autoscaling, RBAC, network policies, Ingress configuration, and GitOps-based deployment pipelines.
18. Serverless Architecture (AWS Lambda / Azure Functions / Cloud Run) — Refactor event-driven, stateless workloads into serverless functions that scale automatically from zero to millions of requests, eliminating server management and reducing costs to pure pay-per-execution pricing.
19. API-First Modernization — Wrap legacy application logic behind RESTful or GraphQL APIs using API Gateway (AWS API Gateway, Azure APIM, Kong, Apigee), enabling gradual modernization, third-party integration, and mobile front-end development without touching legacy backends.
20. Event-Driven Architecture (Kafka / SQS / Event Grid) — Decouple application components using message queues and event streaming platforms (Apache Kafka, AWS SQS/SNS, Azure Service Bus, Google Pub/Sub) — improving resilience, enabling real-time data pipelines, and supporting eventual consistency across distributed services.
21. Database Modernization — Migrate from legacy RDBMS (Oracle, DB2, SQL Server) to modern cloud-native alternatives: Amazon Aurora, Azure Cosmos DB, Google Spanner, CockroachDB, or open-source PostgreSQL — with full schema conversion, data validation, and cutover support.
Infrastructure as Code & Platform Engineering
22. Terraform — Define and provision cloud infrastructure across AWS, Azure, and GCP using declarative HCL configuration. We build reusable, modular Terraform codebases with remote state management, drift detection, and CI/CD-integrated plan/apply pipelines.
23. AWS CloudFormation & CDK — AWS-native IaC using CloudFormation templates or the AWS Cloud Development Kit (CDK) for type-safe infrastructure definition in TypeScript, Python, Java, or C#.
24. Pulumi — Modern IaC platform that uses general-purpose programming languages (Python, TypeScript, Go) for cloud provisioning, with built-in testing, policy enforcement, and multi-cloud support.
25. Ansible & Chef / Puppet — Configuration management and application deployment automation for hybrid environments, ensuring consistent, idempotent server configuration at scale across on-premise and cloud nodes.
26. Helm & Kustomize — Kubernetes package management and configuration overlay tools for managing complex application deployments with environment-specific customization, versioned releases, and rollback capabilities.
Networking, Security & Compliance
27. Hybrid Connectivity — Establish secure, high-bandwidth connectivity between on-premise data centres and cloud VPCs/VNets using AWS Direct Connect, Azure ExpressRoute, Google Cloud Interconnect, or site-to-site IPsec VPN — with redundant paths and failover configuration.
28. Zero-Trust Network Architecture — Implement identity-based access controls, micro-segmentation, service mesh (Istio, Linkerd), and mTLS encryption between microservices — replacing perimeter-based security with continuous verification for cloud and hybrid environments.
29. Cloud Security Posture Management (CSPM) — Continuously scan cloud infrastructure for misconfigurations, overly permissive IAM policies, unencrypted data stores, and compliance violations using tools such as AWS Security Hub, Microsoft Defender for Cloud, Prisma Cloud, and Wiz.
30. Regulatory Compliance (PCI-DSS, HIPAA, SOC 2, ISO 27001) — Design cloud architectures that meet regulatory requirements from day one: data residency controls, encryption at rest and in transit, audit logging with immutable trails, secrets management (AWS Secrets Manager, Azure Key Vault, HashiCorp Vault), and automated compliance reporting.
Cost Optimization & FinOps
31. Right-Sizing & Reserved Instance Planning — Analyze workload utilization patterns and recommend compute right-sizing, Reserved Instance or Savings Plan purchases, and Spot/Preemptible instance strategies to reduce cloud spend by 30–60% versus on-demand pricing.
32. Cloud Cost Visibility (AWS Cost Explorer / Azure Cost Management / Infracost) — Implement tagging strategies, cost allocation dashboards, budget alerts, and anomaly detection to give engineering and finance teams full visibility into cloud spend per team, product, and environment.
33. FinOps Practice — Establish cross-functional FinOps processes that align engineering, finance, and product stakeholders around cloud unit economics, enabling data-driven decisions on build vs. buy, workload placement, and architecture trade-offs.
Post-Migration Optimization & Managed Services
34. Observability Stack (Prometheus / Grafana / OpenTelemetry) — Instrument cloud-native applications with distributed tracing, metrics collection, and centralized logging using OpenTelemetry, Prometheus, Grafana, Loki, Datadog, or the native cloud observability stack — providing full-stack visibility from infrastructure to application performance.
35. Site Reliability Engineering (SRE) — Define SLOs, SLIs, and error budgets for critical services; build automated runbooks; implement chaos engineering (AWS Fault Injection Simulator, Gremlin) to proactively validate resilience before incidents occur.
36. Managed Cloud Operations — Ongoing cloud management, patching, cost monitoring, security review, and architecture optimization as a managed service — allowing your team to focus on product development rather than infrastructure operations.