Every business is undergoing digital transformation, one of the biggest trends in the tech world. The cloud has become an important component of this transition.
According to a report, 83% of businesses are already utilizing cloud services, and the market is anticipated to reach $623,3 billion by 2023.
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Creating an environment that encourages and helps employees embrace all that comes with change is vital to a successful migration. Your people, culture, processes, and automation tools all play a role in the migration of this scale.
“So, don’t just get there. Get there with style!”
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Migration to the cloud can be intimidating. There are concerns regarding stability, cost, and, most importantly, security. Cloud migration can reduce costs, enhance scalability, and reduce the risk of a cyber incident that could derail your business.
So, let’s get down to it: what is cloud migration? Which factors should be considered? Furthermore, what are the advantages of cloud migrations?
Cloud Migration – An Overview
Cloud migration involves the transfer of your business applications to the cloud. Organizations may sometimes keep specific applications in-house while moving others to the cloud.
A recent study by Markets and Markets predicts that cloud adoption will increase at a compound annual growth rate (CAGR) of 16.3% between 2021 and 2026.
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The process of migrating applications from on-premises servers to the cloud usually involves several steps:
Determine whether your application is suitable for migration or not;
Prepare for the migration by setting up an environment in which you will be able to test your application;
Develop a plan for migrating your application;
Test and verify your application before migrating it
Moving to the cloud reduces costs by eliminating the need for expensive IT hardware, software, and personnel. Cloud computing makes it easier for businesses to scale up or down as needed without worrying about managing the underlying infrastructure.
One of the benefits of migrating to the cloud is that you can access a wide range of applications, software, and services through a single interface. This makes it easier for you to manage multiple systems all at once.
Reasons To Migrate To The Cloud
The cloud offers several advantages over traditional methods of IT infrastructure management:
Lower costs – Cloud providers charge based on how much you use their services, meaning you can scale your infrastructure up and down as needed without investing in expensive hardware.
Easier maintenance – The cloud provides an easy way to manage the security of your data and applications, with backups and disaster recovery systems built in as standard.
Disaster Recovery – In case of any disaster, such as fire, flood, or natural calamities, your data will be safe in the cloud. Your business will not suffer because of catastrophe if you have a cloud disaster recovery plan and a backup plan.
Increased Collaboration – When you move to the cloud, it becomes easy for everyone in your company to work on the same project at the same time without worrying about compatibility issues or access restrictions.
Improved uptime – Because applications are hosted on multiple machines, they’re more likely to be available when you need them most – after all, if one server goes down, it doesn’t mean you lose everything!
Key Success Factors for Your Cloud Migration Journey
Migrating to the cloud can be a daunting task. There are many factors to consider, including security and compliance requirements, applications, services, and data migrations.
1. Manage Organizational Change
Cloud migration requires lots of changes in the way you do things internally. There will be changes in processes, systems, and even people involved in the project. Make sure that these changes are managed well so that they don’t impact productivity and service quality negatively. For example, people might have different apprehensions and expectations from the cloud, and an effective communication plan is the key to success.
2. Quality of Deliverables Matter the Most
Cloud migration is not just about moving data from one place to another. It is about transforming your business in such a way that it becomes more agile and efficient. Therefore, quality deliverables are extremely important during this process as they help meet business objectives and expectations. Ensure that you are keeping expectations in check and due diligence is done for workloads which are highly critical to the business. Often these applications require white glove treatment and should adhere to high-quality cloud architecture standards. This will ensure you keep migrating to the cloud and the business trusts your ability to execute.
3. Build Strong Cloud Foundations
Building strong cloud foundations on which you can build and migrate workloads is key to success for the project teams. Take into consideration items such as networking, latency, storage, computing, high availability, disaster recovery and backups while building your foundations. Choosing the correct region for primary and disaster recovery sites is often a key decision which can impact future migrations. File services are also a key factor for operational efficiency.
Building the correct foundations which are business unit focused is highly critical. Just to mention a few problems if this does not occur are:
Often companies migrate their workloads and start reaching subscription limitations and start facing RBAC-related issues.
Business units and application support teams struggle with the correct access levels and building further on the cloud side.
4. Have a Defined and Documented Migration Plan
Migrating to the cloud doesn’t happen overnight — it takes time and planning. A defined plan helps you manage the migration process from start to finish. It also ensures that all stakeholders know what steps must be taken and who needs to be involved at various stages of the process. In addition, a documented plan provides visibility into your current and target environments once you’ve migrated everything over. In addition, highly critical workloads should be given due importance, and dedicated project plans and execution teams should work on those to ensure minimum impact and proper planning and execution are done.
5. Choose the Right Partner
Migrating from one platform to another can disrupt businesses because it forces them to adapt their processes, policies, and procedures. This requires old-school IT skills like server maintenance and new-school cloud-based solutions that allow organizations to scale up as needed. Your cloud partner should have experience working with both types of environments so they can advise you on how best to proceed with your migration strategy.
6. Manage Your Charge Back Policies and Costs
It is highly important that appropriate naming conventions are followed, and tagging is mandated across the board so that charge-back and show-back policies can be created to report on cloud costs. This is highly critical so that the business and the support teams have their own budgets and can effectively collaborate in cost optimization exercises.
7. Have a Dedicated Cloud Operations Team
Cloud Operations also might be a new area for your existing operations teams. Hence managing transfer to operations from project teams is key to success. Usually, it is a good practice to have a dedicated team getting a handover from the project team post-warranty period to provide support to the applications migrated to the cloud. Application teams must know the process to engage the cloud operations team for support post-migration
Conclusion
It’s important to remember that there are plenty of reasons why you should consider transitioning to a cloud-based infrastructure, but the benefits are often conditional. If you research and choose the right partner, like Transpire Technologies, for your transition, you can make your migration as smooth as possible. Transpire Technologies has the skillset, expertise, and flexible approach to help you realize your business goals without compromising your data, budget, or timeline.
