5 factors to consider when migrating Elastic to the cloud

As organizations continue migrating to the cloud to benefit from a flexible, affordable and scalable infrastructure, they need to examine all the interdependencies and consider several factors to ensure a smooth transition.

When you migrate your Elastic workloads to the cloud, you should take several factors into consideration so you can maximize your investments and minimize disruption — business continuity during migration, total cost of ownership optimization, disaster recovery, compliance, and security. Read on to learn more about the five factors to consider when moving Elastic workloads to the cloud and the ways that you can address them.

Business continuity for Elastic workloads during migration

Cloud migration does not happen overnight, in fact, according to a report from McKinsey, 38% of cloud migration projects were behind schedule by more than one quarter and 13% were behind schedule by more than three quarters. With such a high-impact and potentially lengthy infrastructure change, it is critical to ensure the original workloads are not disrupted as environments evolve during the different stages of the migration journey.

Good news, Elastic has the built-in capability to operate seamlessly across all environments, no matter what your environment looks like – fully on-premises, hybrid, or even multi-cloud — so none of your Elastic workloads will be impacted during migration.

With the cross-cluster search feature, you can easily access data stored in both on-premises and cloud environments, in parallel. And, as you decommission the on-premises environments and scale out your cloud environments – including across multiple cloud providers, the cross-cluster search feature can also bring together the data stored in all your cloud environments under a single pane of glass — for improved visibility and faster time to insights.

Optimized total cost of ownership with Elastic in the cloud

One of the top reasons for organizations to migrate to the cloud is to reduce the total cost of ownership, but how can you put the native characteristics of cloud computing to use and optimize the costs of your Elastic workloads?

1. Automatically migrate aging data to cheaper hardware with built-in data lifecycle management capabilities and a tiered architecture.
2. Further reduce storage costs by storing less frequently accessed data in cost-effective object storage like Amazon S3, Google Cloud Storage, and Microsoft Azure Blob Storage, and still have the ability to search across them with searchable snapshots.
3. Harness the power of on-demand storage and compute through autoscaling, to ensure your resource capacity meets resource utilization while paying only for what you use.
4. Reduce the time wasted on setting up new environments with the ability to hit the ground running through instantly provisioned Elastic deployments in any of the dozens of supported regions across Amazon Web Services (AWS, Google Cloud, and Microsoft Azure.
5. Minimize data transfer costs by storing data closer to the source and using the cross-cluster search feature to access it so that only the data actually being used is sent across the network.
6. Reduce costs associated with operational overhead by utilizing a managed service for Elastic, eliminating maintenance and upkeep, so you can focus resources on using the platform to help you run your business.

Highly available and resilient Elastic deployments

A 2021 outage in AWS took down services like Slack, Grindr, McDonalds App, and Epic Games Store, and a 2019 outage in Google Cloud took down Vimeo, Shopify, and Discord. To mitigate such risks, companies may opt for multi-zone failovers or even multi-region and multi-cloud active-active disaster recovery architectures.

With Elastic Cloud's built-in multi-zone architecture, multi-zone fail-over is available in a straightforward way. To ensure a higher degree of disaster recovery, Elastic also has the capability to replicate data across cloud provider regions and across cloud providers, so that businesses can continue operating as usual even if an entire cloud region or an entire cloud provider goes down.

Compliance when running in the cloud

Many countries define and regulate their data sovereignty. To comply with regulatory requirements, companies need to store data locally instead of sending it across the Internet and storing it in another geographic location. This means you would need to set up multiple deployments around the world, but how can you put the data to use under a single unified view?

Elastic Cloud enables companies to comply with data sovereignty regulations using cross-cluster search. Companies can easily search across all their data centers — so a business that runs an AWS instance in Cape Town, a Google Cloud instance in Hong Kong, and a Microsoft Azure instance in London can search all their data without actually moving their data.

Cloud data security

According to a study by ITPro Today, the biggest issue organizations are facing during cloud adoption is the complexity of cyber security. Security concerns may range from data and privacy protection to software vulnerabilities and denial of services. As you set up Elastic deployments in the cloud, you need to ensure it meets your organization’s security and compliance requirements.

Elastic Cloud (Elastisearch managed service) was designed from the ground up with security in mind – operating systems hardened, non-essential services turned off, and all of the components configured to communicate using encryption to protect both data in motion and data at rest.

On top of this, you also get access to additional tools for auditing and reporting, securing network traffic, and managing your users. Elastic also has dedicated security staff focused on safeguarding the managed service. When vulnerabilities are detected, like with the recent log4j vulnerability, the security staff worked directly with the engineering teams to implement mitigations and remediations so that the managed service customers are instantly protected, whereas self managed customers need to do their own testing and patch rollout.

Next Steps

With these considerations in mind, you now have a better understanding of how to realize the benefits of cloud-native features and ensure a smooth transition when migrating Elastic workloads to the cloud.

Schedule a chat with our experts to see what is the best path forward for your Elastic workloads as you migrate to the cloud.