The most obvious and crucial practice that requires attention is mapping out a migration strategy well before you choose a vendor and cloud provider. This is the stage where you start breaking down every aspect of your business and considering the who, what, why, where, when, and how of each of these aspects is affected by the planned data migration. This stage likely involves seeking out success stories and pulling in consultants about cloud adoption, security, and infrastructure to help alleviate the learning curve in relation to the cloud migration process. Once your initial strategy has been sorted out, break down each piece individually and determine how those small pieces can be optimized to better serve the big picture – your business – as a whole.
This practice involves determining how these optimized strategies will be built out in each aspect of your business. You’ve already determined what the optimized implementations will look like on the back end when moving to a cloud platform. Now is the time to determine the steps to reach those goals. Consider is the individual departments and the employees that comprise them and how this cloud migration project will affect their day-in and day-out activities. All too often, businesses see the potential, overarching benefits of the cloud migration journey but underestimate the changes this enacts on their employees. This leads to individuals not being prepared and needing more time to complete daily tasks to maintain business agility. This means that you have to plan to retrain well ahead of time so that once migration project happens, the transition for employees is well thought out and well explained. This results in a smooth and optimized transition to cloud computing as opposed to multiple challenges along the way.
Now that you’ve done your research and have an optimized strategy in place for each employee and department workloads, it’s time to find the consultants, vendors, and cloud provider that can bring you across the finish line. There are countless options when choosing a cloud provider, ranging from public cloud providers to private clouds or hybrid cloud environments. A big takeaway here is ensuring that these vendors can cost-effectively meet your business’s needs after facilitating a successful cloud migration. One thing to consider here is the compatibility of your current software – commonly referred to as legacy applications – is compatible with your chosen cloud solutions, with or without some augmentations made. This ensures that everything migrated to the cloud environment works as intended and when it’s intended to. Lastly, condense where you can! If there’s a new cloud program or application that combines what you previously used multiple programs for, consider building this adaption into your plan.