With cloud migration businesses are known to experience enhanced security, scalability with data and resources, as well as flexibility for the ever more important IT department.
While these benefits sound amazing, it's important to note as you begin this process that for every successful migration to the cloud, there’s a business that faces many challenges as well. It’s important to ensure your company prepares for the challenges that others have faced in the past. Our goal will be to look at five proven factors to ensure the cloud migration journey your company takes is as optimized and efficient as possible.
It’s important to realize that a process as large and complex as cloud migration is one your business is unlikely to be prepared for alone, be sure to look for experts in the field of cloud infrastructure and cloud adoption that have a proven track record of success.
1. Bring in Your Best Team & Partners
It’s important to not only ensure that you’ve looked for the best possible partner to ensure the individual and unique needs of your business are met, but also to ensure that your best and brightest are playing an active role. All too often the migration process to the cloud is seen as an outsourced endeavor, when in reality the only way it can truly be done in a potential maximizing way is if it is viewed as a partnership.
2. Selective and Essential Migration
An all too common mistake is thinking that anything and everything must go to the cloud. In reality, moving an application to the cloud can involve heavy application adaptation or perhaps even replacing the application all together with one natively designed for the cloud. The last thing any business wants to do is make the move to the cloud take longer than needed or incur unnecessary costs along the way. Thus, small and calculated steps are the proven best method for scaling out the cloud migration project for any company.
3. Evolve and Adapt
The probability that the applications and protocols your company has used day in, and day out will remain unchanged in the cloud platform is very low. The unavoidable and undeniable fact is that your company will need to evolve and adapt the way it works in order to reap the benefits that migrating to the cloud can offer.
4. Bottom Up Cohesive Strategy
All too often cloud migration is seen as an outsourced project, that may involve a few company representatives to keep things moving. However, if the goal is to maximize the benefits of the cloud services and avoid unnecessary hurdles along the way you’ll need to consider the effects that specific moves to the cloud will have throughout your organization. A bottom up approach is proven for success in the planning stages since it allows to account for all users that will be affected by these changes, and training can be allocated ahead of time to ensure there are minimal disruptions to your day to day business necessities and transactions.
5. Out of the Box Data Models
Considering the ways in which your company has used the data it collects and how these processes might look with a migration to the cloud is something too many companies see as an afterthought. This is something you should have a strong discussion with your cloud migration vendor about at the onset of the process to ensure the workflows that will draw insight from this data are not only matching what you had before but exceeding your expectations.
