December 27, 2016 · by Synoptek 4 min read
Although the cloud offers a myriad benefits, including lower operating costs, improved resiliency, and agility, the road to the cloud is laden with several obstacles. From transitioning legacy systems to finding the right cloud vendor, from reducing downtime to mitigating performance issues, from minimizing data loss to not having enough bandwidth – the journey is tricky and tedious. As moving to the cloud can be a complex process, it is crucial to understand the challenges, prepare for the solutions, and ensure a successful cloud migration.
Let’s take a look at the top do’s and don’ts while migrating to the cloud.
Do: Have a Cloud Migration Checklist in Place
Compatibility, interoperability, and performance concerns often keep IT administrators away from moving their complex core applications to the cloud. Without a seamless migration blueprint in place, the project can seem more of a headache, than it’s worth. Developing a cloud migration strategy that is aligned with your business goals is the first step to ensuring a successful journey.
A cloud migration checklist helps you list all aspects of the migration including whether to migrate applications or data, evaluating costs, choosing the appropriate cloud flavor, identifying the right vendor and preparing for challenges, ensuring you do not miss out on any critical process. It helps you:
- Understand business drivers for migration
- Create a robust migration plan
- Understand your organization’s perception and approach to migration
- Evaluate your existing infrastructure, workloads, application architecture
- Understand the outcomes of the new environment
- Keep a check on the associated costs, time, and resource requirements
- Evaluate cloud vendors on various parameters and choose the one that’s best for your organization
Don’t: Move Everything to the Cloud
Moving to the cloud does not necessarily mean all business applications should migrate – you must carefully mitigate factors and determine which apps are best suited for a cloud environment.
- Carefully study how the cloud might impact your applications’ ability to meet stringent compliance, governance, and security issues depending on the industry and region you belong to and migrate accordingly
- Although adopting a hybrid cloud can be a solution to your data security woes, you can choose to have your core servers and critical applications on-premise and move the not-so-critical data and apps to the cloud
- You can also choose to have legacy applications in-house; since they are built on proprietary or outdated platforms, they often cannot benefit from the cloud and need to be re-architected (at a significant cost)
Do: Perform Your Due Diligence
If you want to migrate to the cloud, do your homework! Very often, organizations fail to thoroughly research a cloud technology or provider before embracing it.
- Study your IT infrastructure, needs, and usage to best determine which cloud service is right for you
- Find out how you can leverage the cloud’s on-demand processing power to maximize your applications’ ever-growing needs.
- Deep dive into factors such as tools required, governance structure, performance requirements, and application design, and also understand and address application dependencies well ahead of time to ensure minimum outage
- Choosing a cloud vendor? Jot down a list of expectations, examine their capabilities, fee structure and flexibility, understand their approach to security and privacy, and carefully study their SLAs.
Don’t: Surrender Completely to Your Cloud Vendor
Although your cloud service provider will have an experienced team of cloud technology experts (or so you hope), it is advisable to have in-house cloud expertise as well.
- Working with cloud vendors unfortunately doesn’t give you control over their time, often presenting challenges when a problem arises and you can’t quickly get it resolved.
- In-house experts can help ensure the cloud platform delivers the intended computing power, and also address issues and concerns immediately
- They can help implement your business’ cloud strategy for you and ensure it is optimally managed and controlled.
Top Tips
Migrating to the cloud is a beneficial yet complicated process. In order to get the most from the migration, it is crucial to:
- Have realistic expectations from the migration
- Develop a holistic cloud migration strategy
- Encourage adoption among team members
- Be aware of all costs: license, resource, post implementation, and training costs
- Understand the criticality of your data and choose the appropriate cloud model and vendor
- Efficiently manage user roles and permissions
- Examine the interoperability between your systems and migrate accordingly
- Be prepared to train your IT staff and employees
So take the flight and head to the clouds!
Final Thoughts
Migration to different cloud platforms provide enterprises with multiple integration opportunities. It is estimated that by the year 2020, approximately 80 percent of the small to mid-sized businesses would have migrated to cloud platform. A careful implementation of the above tips will help your organization maximize IT investments and will assist you to formulate an effective cloud migration strategy. These encompasses drafting a robust migration plan, choosing the most suitable vendor, overseeing the associated costs, training your personnel, and most important of all understanding the final outcome.
Want to learn more about cloud computing deployment and migration services? Read how Synoptek can help simplify IT services and infrastructure cost with a robust technology platform that boosts scalability.