More organizations are moving to the cloud all of the time in order to take advantage of innovation, save money, and scalability, experience IT transformation, and enjoy the ease of management. Organizations benefit from this move by becoming more efficient and reaching their business growth goals. For many, cloud adoption starts at the top and becomes a company-wide event. Cloud migration will keep your organization running efficiently in the new environment if you follow specific steps.
Have a Migration Plan
Today’s businesses are using the cloud to improve their clients’ experience. It allows you to meet all of their expectations. While moving your data from one platform to another is intimidating, taking advantage of the cloud is a cost-effective business solution. Smooth integration of the cloud and your traditional infrastructure is one of the top cloud migration challenges. This, along with security concerns, is a significant issue to consider. Note: Ensure the success of this endeavor by having a clear strategy. Come up with a realistic timeline for the project, and limit your number of variables.
Start by assessing your people, technology, and process when it comes to your organization’s current cloud operational maturity. Validate business cases for services and applications that may offer operational and financial benefits from cloud migration, and develop a plan for reaching your desired state. This includes capacity planning, procurement strategies, cloud operating models, and vendor agreement.
Inventory All Assets and Calculate Costs
Create a comprehensive view of your IT portfolio, data center assets, and their relationship to services and assets specific to the cloud. Take inventory of all of your assets before you decide what you are going to move to the cloud. To make sure that nothing breaks during or after the process, define dependencies. Use public or private clouds to visualize dependencies and assets in a single view. Cloud migration is costly. You’ll have to pay for the cloud infrastructure and all of the engineering needed for moving and storing your applications and data. It may seem like this is a major migration challenge, but it isn’t. The popularity of the cloud is causing prices to fall.
The return on investment(ROI) for your cloud services makes it a worthwhile investment. Before migrating to the cloud, make sure you understand the cost. Be sure to simulate the migration services and use the right resources at the best price. Align your cloud expenses with your business costs, and leverage the migration to take advantage of reduced costs. Review your organization’s people and systems, and decide which can be re-purposed or eliminated.
Ensure Compliance and Security
Be aware of all security and regulatory requirements before you start the cloud migration process. You’ll discover several regulations that must be followed. These are particularly important for organizations related to healthcare or financial services. Make sure your provider is ensuring the architecture follows all government regulations. The data in the cloud needs to be stored securely, and the migration strategy should protect it too. Find any compliance gaps or security risks and have them fixed. Verify all policy and security-based compliance across all cloud production environments, and enhance the visibility of all compliance and security resources within your monitoring platform.
Keep in mind that migration won’t happen overnight. Don’t rush the process and risk running over budget or having complications delay the process. Planning helps. Many people expect the migration to be costly and disruptive as well as take too long. They are often surprised that with pre-planning, the process is painless. Most importantly, don’t let the need for cloud migration sneak up on you. Last-minute decisions can be detrimental. See the need coming, and you’ll avoid the operational and financial shock that comes with finding an urgent need to start the process.
Once finished, you want to see the results of the transformation. You should clearly be able to see that you are meeting your business objectives, and it should prove to be cost-effective and efficient. By following the above steps, everything should be running without issues. Cloud migration will improve your workplace productivity which results in satisfied customers that will return to you and promote your business to others.
Author– Cheryl Diaz
