Are you considering moving to the cloud? Here are the steps you should take to ensure a smooth transition

Cloud computing is undoubtedly significant, with a massive impact on modern businesses’ functionality, security and scalability. And experts believe that cloud computing won’t go anywhere – it will only continue to drive business transformation in the future, which is why companies shouldn’t ignore its importance. However, hosting business data in a cloud can be a daunting process that involves technical aspects and requires clear goals and use cases. If implemented successfully, cloud migration comes with tremendous benefits, such as better flexibility and agility, improved scalability and long-term cost management, as well as better workload performance.

Nowadays, companies have more than just a cloud model from which they can choose, such as public, private, multi-cloud, and hybrid. Moreover, they can pick between infrastructure as a service, software as a service and platform as a service, depending on their unique needs. If you’re considering moving to the cloud, you can ensure the process goes smoothly by following a few important steps, which we will explore in detail below. Read on!

Understand why you want to migrate to the cloud

When starting the cloud migration process, you want to establish tangible business purposes for the process and make sure that your expectations are clear. This is important because it will help you choose the right platform that offers all the cloud capabilities you need, and if you cannot pinpoint at least one measurable reason why you want to migrate, it’s probably better to pause the project as early as possible because you won’t have any clear direction.

One of the main reasons why organizations choose to migrate to the cloud is cost savings, as cloud services provide flexible pay-as-you-go pricing models, which substantially decrease costs for IT infrastructure, support, and maintenance. Moreover, using the cloud increases companies’ productivity by allowing them to access highly available and scalable platforms that guarantee top-notch security. To take full advantage of the cloud, many businesses are also embracing cloud native approaches, optimizing their applications to be built specifically for the cloud environment, ensuring flexibility and efficiency.

Assess your current infrastructure and applications

Conducting an assessment is imperative when defining a cloud migration strategy for your business, and it involves analyzing the current IT systems and applications to identify which parts already exist in the cloud and which don’t. A comprehensive assessment is also beneficial because it allows you to choose the right cloud platform for migration. More often than not, it becomes evident that not all data and applications can be moved to the cloud because of compliance and other reasons. Overall, assessing your current applications and infrastructure allows you to make informed decisions about whether you should or shouldn’t migrate to the cloud.

Evaluate migration needs and costs

Here’s the thing: a cloud costs money, so it’s essential to consider these expenses when embarking on a migration project. This involves different fees, such as per-month fees for a SaaS, different costs of IaaS services and resources, and per-user fees for a PaaS. Given that cloud costs are recurring, it’s essential to budget the right funds for ongoing support and migration. Moreover, it’s imperative to grasp the performance requirements as well as the expectations from the workload after the completion of the migration and be ready to establish metrics and KPIs for continuous workload performance and reporting.

Choose a proven cloud partner

You want to consider cloud targets carefully so you can opt for a provider with a proven track record, and that will be in the entrepreneurial space for the foreseeable future. While this may seem like an excessive precaution, remember that provenance matters tremendously when it comes to cloud computing. In fact, there’s nothing more disruptive for a business than realizing that an essential provider is closing its doors – this would only force you to scramble to find another option, which often has unwanted outcomes.

Opt for a transfer method

In order to ensure a smooth cloud migration process, it’s essential to determine how you will move the information from the existing hardware to the new cloud environment. Different options are available, such as a private network, public Internet and physical transfer, each presenting its own tradeoffs regarding speed, time, cost and security. For example, choosing to migrate over public Internet can lead to more downtime for your business, so choosing a private network could be much more cost-effective if that translates into less downtime.

Craft a cloud migration plan

After going through all the steps above, it is time to put together the migration plan that will include what data will be transferred, when, and how exactly. It’s of the utmost importance to craft a detailed plan that reduces disruptions to the operations of your business, so our recommendation is to schedule migration during times of lower activity or outside of peak business hours. The plan should involve provisions for comprehensive data migration, testing and validation of the dependencies (like the required databases), moving the target workload, and conducting the final testing and validation. Once you do this, you should have a clear cutover process that enables the local workload to be turned off and the newly migrated cloud workload to be turned on. Lastly, it’s essential to consider rollback processes for failed or challenging migrations. Any migration testing should involve detailed attention to security and access.

Conduct the mitigation

Once all the pieces and plans are in place, you are ready to migrate the data. The movement and detailed testing takes place at this point, and this is where business and tech leaders (and sometimes workload owners as well) should see the initial performance reporting to guarantee adequate performance and security. When conducted cautiously, migration plans could run the local workloads and cloud concurrently for a short period of time, ensuring the syncing of data and giving more users access to the cloud workload until the cloud is fully deployed.

Takeaway

Cloud migration can unlock tremendous business benefits, but you need to approach it carefully and devise an effective plan to ensure the process is as smooth as possible. By following the steps outlined above, you can minimize disruptions in your business and take advantage of cloud computing’s advantages.