Ensuring a Smooth Cloud Migration at Each Step

You’ve heard that there are significant cost savings associated with cloud migration. You’re aware of how it could impact your customers’ experience and how the solutions you’re considering would create new efficiencies for your team. You’ve also heard from colleagues across the industry that cloud migrations have a way of getting off-course, bogged down in unexpected costs and not delivering the expected outcomes.

How can you ensure that your cloud migration is effective and beneficial for reaching business goals? First, become familiar with the most common areas of complication during a transition to the cloud, including automation, workload placement, security, compliance and infrastructure. For instance, enterprises are finding that traditional networking approaches don’t accommodate bandwidth-hungry, performance-dependent cloud solutions, often causing an unexpected infrastructure upgrade.

There are three general phases to a cloud migration, and the following insights can help ensure a smooth process at each step:

Prior to Migration: Assess infrastructure and compare it with the specifications of the cloud solutions you’re considering. Test the network for speed and performance and examine your staffing requirements. You may need to assign new responsibilities for monitoring resources dedicated to cloud technology.

You’ll also need to do a full audit of the existing and anticipated IT environment to identify potential gaps in security, compliance, automation, and procedural concerns. A full understanding of your existing system is critical so that you are prepared to anticipate issues that could surface during migration.

Workload Placement: You may have an idea that cloud migration will be simply a shift of on-site systems into the cloud, but enterprises often find that a hybrid solution fits their needs because of compliance issues or security concerns. There are four broad options for moving to a cloud solution:

– A shift of legacy solutions into the cloud
– Reinstallation, which creates and deploys workloads to the cloud
– Refactoring with cost of performance optimization
– Redevelopment, which involves rewriting the code

Part of your placement of workloads involves a comprehensive disaster recovery plan and solutions for data backup. Include network security, with encryption and firewalls, as part of your plan to transmit data safely.

Post-Migration: Once the migration is complete, there will still be many areas that need attention, such as incident management, service level agreement (SLA) management, network performance management, and data backup. You’ll also want to explore options for automation, which will be evaluated in the early phases of cloud migration but will be more consistently used in this phase.

Another major area in this phase is reporting in order to optimize cost. Assess the effectiveness of security policies and tools and to evaluate whether the solution is effective at helping you reach operational goals.

For more detailed guidance related to planning a successful cloud migration, contact us at One Connect. We can help you implement a strategy for ensuring your transition to a cloud solution is executed within your timeline and budget.