As more and more organisations recognise the benefits of moving their workloads to the cloud, cloud migration has become a critical step in their digital transformation journey.
A recent survey of IT decision-makers across organizations averaging 13,000 employees revealed that 52% of companies have migrated a majority of their IT environments to the cloud. This includes infrastructure, applications, data analytics, and more.
With cloud adoption accelerating, demand for cloud migration tools to streamline simplify and optimise the migration process is exploding. But not all of these tools are made the same.
What is cloud migration?
Cloud migration is the process of moving applications, data, and infrastructure from a local data centre (on-premises) to a cloud computing environment. This shift can be to a public cloud provider (like AWS, Azure, or Google Cloud), a private cloud, or even between different cloud providers.
The primary goal of cloud migration is to leverage the benefits of cloud computing, such as scalability, flexibility, cost-effectiveness, and improved performance. By moving to the cloud, organizations can:
- Reduce costs. Cloud providers often offer pay-as-you-go pricing models, eliminating the need for upfront hardware and software investments.
- Increase flexibility. Cloud platforms provide a wide range of services and resources that can be easily scaled up or down to meet changing business demands.
- Improve performance. Cloud infrastructure often offers higher levels of reliability, availability, and performance than on-premises data centers.
- Accelerate innovation. Cloud platforms enable organizations to quickly deploy new applications and services, driving innovation and time-to-market.
The choice of migration strategy depends on factors such as the complexity of the application, the desired level of cloud optimization, and the organization's overall business goals.
How do cloud migration tools work?
Cloud migration tools are software applications designed to automate and streamline the process of moving data, applications, and infrastructure from on-premises environments to the cloud. They offer a range of features and capabilities to simplify cloud migration and reduce the risk of errors during the process.
Organizations can implement these tools to assess their existing IT infrastructure, identify potential migration challenges, and develop a comprehensive migration plan. When it comes to immigration, cloud migration tools can:
- Automate the process of extracting, transforming, and loading (ETL) data from on-premises systems to the cloud, and often provides features like data synchronization, data masking, and data validation to ensure data integrity.
- Help migrate applications to the cloud by converting them to cloud-compatible formats or by using containerization technologies like Docker. It may also provide features for application testing and validation in the cloud environment.
- Assist in migrating infrastructure components like servers, storage, and networking to the cloud. It may automate the creation of cloud resources, configuration management, and migration of virtual machines.
Following migration, cloud migration tools provide ongoing monitoring and management of the migrated applications and infrastructure in the cloud through features like performance monitoring, security monitoring, and compliance reporting.
Cloud migration tools can significantly reduce the time and effort required for the migration process. They automate many of the manual tasks, minimize the risk of errors, and provide valuable insights into the migration process, allowing organizations can accelerate their cloud adoption and realize the benefits of cloud computing more quickly.
Best Cloud Migration Tools for 2024
There are a range of different cloud migration solutions available today, each with their own sets of features for helping organizations move their IT infrastructure to the cloud.
Here are ten of the best cloud migration tools on the market today for seamlessly migrating organizational data, applications, and workloads to the cloud.
Help Desk Migration
Help Desk Migration is a no-code cloud migration tool designed to help you move your help desk data to a new system quickly and securely. The platform supports over 300 popular help desk systems, including Zendesk, Freshservice, Freshdesk, Jira Service Management, and more. The tool is also designed to be easy to use for even non-technical users, with a simple and intuitive interface that makes it easy to select the data you want to migrate and map it to the new system.
Help Desk Migration can be used to migrate data between any two help desk systems, regardless of the cloud platform they are hosted on. It also supports incremental migrations, so you can start using the new system before all of your data has been migrated. It is also one of the most affordable cloud migration tools on this list, especially when compared to the cost of hiring a professional migration service.
Movebot
Movebot is the next-generation cloud data migration tool that offers lightning-fast, simple and cost-effective cloud storage migrations. Fully cloud-hosted and managed, its intuitive web interface makes self-managing your migration easy and our automated platform takes care of the heavy lifting. You can create a migration plan and use Movebot’s pre-flight scan to make sure your migration won’t get caught by any obstacles or delays. With detailed warnings, conflicts, and issues, the platform lets you fix potential barriers before you start, allowing you to move the bulk of your data to the new platform with minimal issues.
Movebot provides delta migrations to only shift over files updated since the last move. There’s no need for teams to stop working on files or other annoyances. There is no need to manage or run infrastructure or pay a per-user license either. The platform maintains and manages the entire infrastructure automatically, saving you time, resources, and money. It also automates file sanitisation, flagging and solving conflicts during the migration, ensuring the data is migrated correctly.
Cloudsfer
Cloudsfer provides a range of self or professional migration services for migrating users, copying file storage, cloud sync service and backing up your files anywhere. With Cloudsfer, you can move your data to over 20 different cloud storages with one easy-to-use migration platform. This could be migrated to Microsoft 365, OneDrive FTP, Box Dropbox, Azure blob S3, or even GSuite migration Meanwhile, through the platform’s multi-user Migration solution, you can transfer multiple users in a few quick steps. Using Cloudsfer you can transfer cloud to cloud (e.g. Dropbox to Google Drive) data including security, permissions, metadata and filter out unneeded files.
Cloudsfer enables you to transfer data from your File System and from various ECM systems and integrates over 20 cloud storage providers at your fingertips. Using the platform’s SharePoint migration tool – Tzunami Deployer – allows you to also transfer data from older Enterprise Content Management (ECM) systems to SharePoint Online, OneDrive, Microsoft Teams and more.
StarfishETL
Whether you're migrating from an on-prem, cloud, or hybrid environment, StarfishETL handles your migration from start to finish so you don’t have to. The platform offers full-service integrations and migrations, providing a vast library of more than 300 applications that allows you to move data seamlessly with security and structure, even if it’s hosted on-prem.
StarfishETL’s Cloud Cartographer is also based on a visual interface that makes it easy to perform field-to-field mapping, create data transformations, control projects and workflows, test your migration, and manage your data project on your terms.
Google Cloud Migration Center
Google’s Cloud Migration Center is a centralised hub for migration and modernisation, providing all the necessary tools, resources, and best practices to help enterprises navigate their migration journey with confidence. With features like cloud spend estimation, asset discovery of your current environment, and a variety of tooling for different migration scenarios, the platform provides you with all the tools you need for your migration. It helps you create an inventory of your assets, including servers, Microsoft SQL Server, MySQL, and PostgreSQL databases, by automatically scanning your on-premises environment. You can also generate a rapid cost estimate of your future cloud costs based on the size and configuration of the resources in your current on-premises environment. This lets you and your organization take some guesswork out of future cloud budgets.
The Google Cloud Migration Center automatically analyses workloads, dependencies, and performance metrics, giving you valuable insights to assess the readiness of your workloads for migration, identify potential challenges, and develop effective migration strategies. It also applies application compatibility analysis and testing to identify required modifications to carry out your migration to the Google Cloud successfully. This helps you mitigate risks, reduce potential disruptions, and ensure seamless application performance post-migration.
Dynatrace
From planning and designing a cloud migration strategy to streamlining the process, the Dynatrace cloud migration platform measures and ensures the success of all your cloud migration projects. Its cloud migration software tracks and manages every stage of the process, performing application assessments to create a better cloud environment that matches your business requirements. It also minimises performance degradation and ensures optimal performance throughout each migration cycle with granular before-and-after performance data.
If observability challenges do occur, the platform boasts a powerful Causal AI that can identify the root cause of issues allowing teams to pro-actively identify and resolve issues before they impact customers, as well as an integrated automation engine to automatically discover all microservices and to automatically take action when issues arise.
Matillion
Matillion is a powerful cloud migration solution that removes the pain and time costs of pipeline creation by making it easier to connect and move data between your sources and cloud platforms. With Millions Data Productivity Cloud, you connect to any data source, load into your preferred cloud data platform, and make your data accessible to your entire organization, from any device.
Specifically designed for cloud data warehouses, Matillion’s software is the only ETL solution that integrates with Amazon Redshift, Microsoft Azure Synapse, Snowflake and Google BigQuery. Its broader number of integrations makes the most of its many benefits, allowing you to perform powerful transformations on data before feeding it into your preferred business intelligence tools, including the likes of Tableau, Looker and Power BI.
ShareGate
ShareGate is an out-of-the-box management solution for your migrations and everyday Teams and SharePoint operations. The platform’s easy-to-use migration tool packs a powerful set of features that make big migration projects easy. You can migrate to Microsoft 365, move channels in Teams, merge tenants and get everything you need for a successful migration plus unlimited support from the ShareGate team.
With the Sharegate Migrate planner, you can move channels from one team to another, or migrate entire teams from another tenant in just a few clicks. You can then copy the entire plan – plans, buckets, tasks, attachments, members, assignments, views, and comments included – or choose to leave some objects like comments behind. Once moved everything over, you can verify your migration after the move, fix any issues fast, and then continue to pivot with organisational changes.
Azure Migrate
Azure Migrate is an industry-leading cloud migration tool for Azure that helps you monitor the discovery, evaluation, and migration of on-premworkloads and data to the Azure environment with the help of a centralised portal. The platform can help you discover and assess their on-premises workloads, plan their migration and then execute it. Once the migration is complete, it can also help you optimise workloads after they have been migrated to Azure. This includes everything from identifying opportunities to improving the performance and cost-effectiveness of the migrated workloads.
Azure Migrate makes it easy to identify and gather details on your infrastructure, databases, applications, and virtual desktop interfaces (VDI). Its map dependencies and estimate costs for various scenarios in Azure, providing insights to create a business proposal to help make the case to move to Azure. Unlike many other entries on this list, Azure is also free to use for Azure customers for the first 30 days and then is charged on a pay-as-you-go basis. It’s also incredibly user-friendly and easy to use, even for organisations with limited cloud migration experience.
AWS Migration Hub
A cloud titan in itself, AWS offers a range of purpose-built features to help you migreate to the cloud. All of these features are pre-built into the AWS Migration Hub – a central location to collect server and application inventory data for the assessment, planning, and tracking of migrations to AWS...With predefined workflow templates, THIS hub allows you can easily create a migration workflow, customise your workflow per your specific needs, automate the migration steps, and track the migration progress from start to finish in one place.
The AWS Migration hub also discovers applications to determine whether they can be migrated and review modernisation strategy recommendations You can also automate many of the manual tasks involved in migrating large-scale enterprise applications to AWS and managing dependencies between different tools. This makes AWS migration hub one of the best cloud migration tools available today, providing IT teams with all the tools they need to streamline the migration process.