This article shares the top eight things to consider before planning a cloud migration project.
Migrating to the cloud comes with a whole host of benefits. Some of these include acceleration of business growth, enhanced operational efficiency, improved productivity, flexibility, robust cybersecurity, and seamless accessibility.
Cloud migration is also crucial to cutting down technology costs. For example, you no longer have to purchase and maintain servers in your on-premises data center. You also don’t have to deal with hiring personnel, utilities, overheads, and much more.
However, despite countless advantages, making a move up to the cloud demands careful consideration.
Define your reasons for cloud migration. Before you do anything, ask why we are moving to the Cloud. Cloud migrations take much effort and demand justification.
To understand which areas, benefit the most from cloud migration, you must have a comprehensive view of your business. This approach will help you determine what to focus on during the cloud migration planning phase.
Asking questions will also help you choose the most suitable cloud computing model and get the best return on investment.
Before committing, you must decide whether to host your workloads on a public, private, or hybrid cloud infrastructure.
On a public cloud, you will receive services over a public network (not a private one) and be available for others to use. This popular cloud computing model is used by Amazon Web Services (AWS) and Google Cloud Platform (GCP). You also share resources and only pay for what you use so that public clouds can be highly cost-effective.
In contrast, on a private cloud, your dedicated infrastructure will be managed by either your in-house team or a third-party provider. You will have your dedicated hardware on or off-premises, running a private network. In highly regulated industries, this is usually the only option.
Hybrid clouds combine the best of both worlds. By combing private and public cloud infrastructure, you can stay compliant while scaling your infrastructure up or down to meet seasonal demand.
In this scenario, businesses usually store sensitive data on a private cloud while running the application layer in a public environment.
To maintain the security and location of data, you must recognize that you hold your own and your client’s sensitive information. Especially for industries like law and finance, data security is a crucial factor that can make or break a business.
To ensure that your data migration is successful, it’s essential to first align your application governance and security requirements with the security provisions of your potential cloud platforms. This will enable you to ensure that your applications and data are protected and fully accessible while remaining auditable.
The second step is to manage data access effectively by keeping track of accessibility and expenses. This will prevent cloud costs from spiraling out of control while maintaining secure and accessible data.
To ensure a successful cloud migration for your company, selecting the appropriate cloud provider that meets your business requirements is crucial. Different applications may have distinct needs, so it is often beneficial for businesses to adopt a hybrid, multi-cloud strategy that combines private Cloud, public Cloud, and SaaS providers. However, managing such a mixed strategy can pose challenges.
Conducting due diligence is essential to determine the best solution for your company. Seek references from trusted sources, focusing on critical factors such as technical expertise, customer satisfaction, market dominance, and reputation. Once you have shortlisted considerable cloud providers, consider specific capabilities such as data center reliability, quality of engineering team, data security strategy, customer reviews, patch and update management solutions, and customer service.
By solving these matters, you can avoid making mistakes when migrating to the Cloud and select the most suitable cloud provider for your business needs.
Once you have determined that cloud computing is a suitable option and have selected a qualified provider, several factors must be considered. Firstly, it is crucial to have a realistic understanding of the costs and timelines involved in the migration process and how they align with your budget. Remember that the financial service providers’ requirements, resources, and perceptions of reasonable cloud migration costs may differ from those of e-commerce platforms. Therefore, even if cloud migration is the right choice for your business, the associated expenses and time requirements may pose significant challenges.
Additionally, you will need to establish a framework to track the migration process effectively. In this regard, the reliability and timeliness of your service providers are critical. It is essential to ensure that they have a proven methodology and a track record of delivering high-quality services.
Application compatibility is a vital consideration before making the switch to the Cloud. You must ensure that your apps work in the cloud environment of your choice. While some applications may function adequately in the cloud without any changes, others might need refactoring or completely redesigned.
To make an application compatible with the cloud setting, refactoring entails changing its codebase without changing its behavior. To increase performance or scalability, this strategy may entail changing the architecture or code of the program. The process of redesigning an application for the cloud, in comparison, involves substantial alterations to the application’s architecture, infrastructure, and codebase.
Before moving an application to the cloud, it is important to verify compatibility to avoid severe problems like decreased performance, more downtime, and diminished usefulness. Therefore, it’s crucial to carefully assess your apps to see if they need to be refactored or completely redesigned before moving them to the cloud. This assessment will assist you in avoiding compatibility problems and ensuring that your applications work and perform at their best when running in the cloud.
Before selecting a cloud provider, you must grasp the performance and availability requirements of your applications and workloads. This knowledge will assist you in choosing a cloud service provider who can satisfy your needs and offer the resources required to support your workloads and applications.
It’s crucial to consider the redundancy and failover skills that each cloud provider can offer to keep uptime and avoid service interruptions. Choosing a cloud provider with multiple data centers or regions may be necessary to guarantee that your workloads and apps continue functioning in the event of a failure or outage.
The cloud provider’s Service Level Agreements (SLAs) regarding speed and availability should also be considered. These SLAs specify the degree of service you can anticipate from the cloud provider and the payment you will get if they don’t meet their obligations.
Backups will be crucial to your cloud migration. So, ensure you have backed up anything and everything before embarking on a cloud migration project.
At the same time, diving into the cloud vendor’s backup and disaster recovery policies is also essential. Business continuity is critical, so define your recovery point objective (RPO) and recovery time objective (RTO).
In the near future, the cloud will become a business imperative to deliver enhanced user experiences and maintain a competitive advantage. So, if you haven’t already digitally transformed your business, it’s best to start planning for the inevitable.
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