Cloud Computing has become a booming industry in this growing technology era. It is making a significant impact on various IT sectors and businesses. The majority of organisations are looking for cloud migration services—however, the procedure to move your business to cloud is a tedious task. You need to follow some best strategies for successful cloud migration so that you can achieve real-time performance and efficiency of cloud services for your business.Â
This article will answer all your queries about cloud migration. We will cover the following pointers in this article:
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Before we head into the best practices, let’s discuss some common challenges for cloud migration.
Common Challenges for Cloud Migration
Although we have several benefits of migration to the cloud, there are some roadblocks to be cleared. Let us discuss the challenges for cloud migration:
- Unclear Goals
No proper vision and cloud migration planning (maybe short-term or long-term) will become a tedious task for cloud migration throughout the organisation.
- Lack of Sponsorship
Not having proper investment skills, talent, time, and efforts.
- Incorrect Choice of Technology
Incorrect choice of technology will increase organisations’ workloads and lead to choosing the wrong cloud product and service model. Organisations can successfully migrate to the cloud using the right technology and save their expenditure with a competitive advantage and rapid innovation.
- Improper Delivery and Operational Model
For successful cloud migration, your organisation needs the right people, processes, and technologies throughout the cloud migration process.
- Security and Compliance
Data breaching is one of the major issues while migrating to the cloud. If the security glitches are left open to the cloud server, it will be a catastrophe.
To ensure data security migrating to the cloud, the data must comply with relevant requirements and regulations for its protection.
To overcome all these cloud migration challenges, we need to comply with some best practices to migrate your data and applications to the cloud successfully.
So, let’s discuss the best practices for successful cloud migration.
Best Practices for Successful Cloud Migration
Migrating your business to the cloud will improve operational efficiency and performance, agility, scalability, and security. It will also reduce your capital expenditures as the cloud provides the pay-as-you-go model.
Let’s begin discussing the practices for pre-migration stages.
Pre-Migration Stage
- Have a clear vision and migration strategy
You need to have a clear vision and understanding and later map your organisation’s best migration strategy. Moving forward, explain clearly why this strategy suits them best and communicate it broadly throughout your organisation.
- Cloud governance model must be outlined and shared clearly
To ensure that the organisation’s objectives are met, you need to identify a team’s roles and responsibilities. A clear cloud governance model enables you to integrate the right controls for improving your security.
- Train your Staff early
If you train your staff early, they can adapt to the new way of working quickly and makes the migration process much smoother. They can simultaneously learn about cloud computing and improve your organisation’s performance and efficiency.
- Understanding the working of cloud operations
Spend your time and efforts on how the cloud operates to enhance your business. This will help you improvise your business strategies and empower your teams.
- Note down your IT Assets
Identify which IT assets you currently have at your organisation and the assets you are including in each migration. This will help you to quantify and measure the success of your cloud adoption.
- Choose the right cloud service provider
You must choose the right cloud service provider as your partner who helps you throughout your cloud migration journey. Not only technical expertise and experience, but the cloud service provider must also have the knowledge and experience in agile methodologies and project management frameworks.
Migration Stage
- Begin with small and straightforward processes
Kickstart your migration process with small and straightforward procedures so that your employees will get comfortable with the cloud.
- Automate some processes
The agility of the cloud is perceived through automation. Identify processes that are revisiting and establish new methods that can be automated. If all the operations cannot be automated, define the functions that can be automated thoroughly and guide your teams to automate them.
- Adjust the cloud as transformational
Adjust your internal processes to determine the cloud as transformational.
- Utilise fully managed services wherever applicable
Always try to leverage full managed services wherever applicable for faster migration.
Post-Migration Stage
- Monitoring the entire process
Map a comprehensive monitoring strategy, and always keep your eyes wide open on the entire migration process. This will ensure you what is happening in-depth and build robust architectures for your applications.
- Monitoring using Cloud-native monitoring tools
There are numerous cloud-native monitoring tools available in the market, and try to choose the best tools that suit your business needs. It will ensure a clear picture of what is going on during the migration process.
Mass Migration Stages (Hundreds of Applications at once)
- Develop a robust migration factory having teams, tools, and processes all centred around the migration activities
You need to properly document your migration details and share them with your organisation before your first migration process starts.
- Assign leadership and regulate benchmarks for migration factory
Allot a program team (PMO) with a leader responsible for managing the migration operations, ensuring frequent communication. Also, create a Cloud Center of Excellence (CoE) team to monitor your migration efforts. The team also provides technical support and guidance.
- Start an Onboarding process for new team members
Keep an onboarding process for new team members on cloud migration tools simultaneously while migrating your business processes and applications to the cloud.
- Allocate talents wisely across the organisation
Gather all talented employees and allocate them to different roles and responsibilities across several teams in the organisation to ensure a smooth transition of cloud migration.
- Examine numerous criteria on migration strategies for a specific application
Map out several criteria for deciding on a migration strategy for each application, such as objectives, roadmap, risks, expenditures, etc.
- Identify patterns and build blueprints for them
When you plan on migrating activities, some patterns will rise predicated on a strategy. Build reusable blueprints for these patterns to improve the momentum of the migrated workloads. This will increase the speed and efficiency of migration activities.
- Testing applications
Every application must undergo through predetermined and well-documented tests. This will reduce errors in migration operations.
- Incorporate a culture of over-communication into all the teams involved
Communication across several teams in the organisation will help your business for a smoother transition of cloud migration.
Migration to the cloud seems a tedious process, but following the right procedure and best practices will lead to your business’s successful migration to the cloud smoothly and efficiently.
With this, I would like to end my article on Cloud migration. We have covered almost all the best practices to follow for successful cloud migration, and I hope you are clear with it. If you have any questions, feel free to ask them in the comments section.
