Cloud migration makes perfect sense for a growing company. The combination of scalable, on-demand infrastructure, minimal capital investment up front, and robust security and resilience results in a compelling business case. However, migrating your company’s IT infrastructure to the cloud is no easy task, and there’s much more than greets the eyes.
To properly plan, you must first understand what you are preparing for. This seven-step cloud migration checklist will assist you in making the right decisions.
1. Examine Your Infrastructure and Preparedness
The first step you should take when planning your cloud migration is to examine their business requirements and procedures and how a move to the cloud will affect you. Adopting the cloud may need reorganizing your entire firm to accommodate the new technologies.
Investigate the effects of shifting to the cloud on your data management, security measures, and disaster recovery strategies from a business aspect. You must also consider how well their applications and infrastructure are fit for cloud migration. Not every application and infrastructure configuration is a good fit for cloud computing.
2. Create a Cloud Migration Strategy
You should not enter the cloud blindly; instead, have a robust cloud migration strategy first. This strategy should detail your migration procedure step by step; you should know which data you’ll move over initially and how long you estimate the migration process to take. Your company doesn’t have to keep to its strategy in the long term, but having one offers you a starting point to strive toward. If your company is looking for office 365 migration planning, then it would be wise to consult with IT professionals to help fulfill your needs.
3. Identify and Involve Important Stakeholders to Build Project Momentum
Obtaining buy-in from key stakeholders is critical to ensure that your cloud migration and continuing cloud usage operate as planned and provide a good ROI. Make contact with important personnel within your organization, including business stakeholders and IT. Speak with them to learn about how they presently utilize IT and their future goals and objectives. Inform them of the advantages of moving to the cloud while also managing expectations by indicating there might be some hiccups along the road.
This would not only help you describe your cloud migration goals, but it will also guarantee that your users are satisfied with the results.
4. Consider Potential Security Threats
Although cloud vendors make strong claims regarding the reliability of their products, your company should never be too cautious. As you’ll be accessing the cloud over the internet, the question is whether you require an encrypted channel to access your cloud infrastructure or if you can utilize a public network. If this is the case, you’ll need rigorous authentication and access control mechanisms to prevent unauthorized people from accessing your data.
5. Choose a Vendor
If you’re performing a pure public cloud migration, you’ll most likely decide between Microsoft Azure, Amazon Web Services, and Google Cloud Platform. Other players working their entry into cloud hosting include Oracle, Alibaba, and IBM Cloud, although most businesses chose from the top three.
Your choice will be based on your individual company needs and the suite of applications you use to manage your firm.
6. Estimate Costs
Another crucial element on your cloud adoption checklist is ensuring the project and any subsequent charges are within your organization’s budget. You may opt to migrate certain applications or functionalities to the cloud in batches rather than conducting a complete shift at once. Examine which apps will benefit the most from being transferred to the cloud and which will be reasonably simple to convert, and then plan when you will move each one.
Furthermore, you should anticipate not just the labor expenses of the switch but also ongoing network and bandwidth expenditures.
7. Outline a Change Management Strategy
Finally, include a change management strategy in your cloud migration checklist. This includes providing workers with the required training and workshops to help them comprehend changes to procedures, technology, and, most importantly, how it affects them as individuals.
One of the primary reasons that the adoption of new technology fails is because firms fail to plan for the human aspect, making it difficult for employees and customers to adopt the new technologies and procedures.
Closing Thoughts
Every migration will be unique based on an organization’s unique technological and business needs. With this cloud adoption checklist, you should identify crucial decisions that must be taken as well as any areas with insufficient resources and expertise or cloud migration issues that may arise.
