What You Need to Know Before Migrating Your Business to the Cloud

What You Need to Know Before Migrating Your Business to the Cloud

Moving to the Cloud might be on every organization’s agenda, but the constant question to ask is, “Are these organizations ready to make a move to the Cloud?” The benefits of the Cloud might be numerous, but every organization needs to be prepped before the move can be successfully made. To get the most out of the move to the Cloud, here are a few necessary steps which need to be performed before moving to the Cloud.

Does the Cloud Have all the Resources to Sustain Your Needs?

The first step is to understand what resources you would need to post your move into the Cloud. During the investigation stage, check what hardware your business already has, and all you would need to move to the Cloud successfully. You need to take into consideration all your applications, web servers, storage possibilities, databases, along with the other necessary components. These days, most businesses are relying heavily on AWS services, along with databases like RDS and NoSQL to do their bidding.

An organization can make use of AWS services like EC2, S3, Glacier, and RDS amongst many other things. This way, one can understand the Cloud and its service options, while there are other ways to understand the different resources available within the Cloud. The idea is to know if these resources are enough for you to manage your deliverables.

Which Applications Go First?

This concept is a crucial factor since an organization can have a series of applications, which need to be migrated to the Cloud. During the migration stage, an organization has an option to push everything in one single instance or migrate slowly and steadily over some time. If you are doing the latter, you might want to identify the most critical applications to be relocated, which might be followed by the rest of the applications. On the contrary, you can try and push those applications which have minimum complexity, and dependencies, so that post-migration, there is minimum impact on production and operations.

How do You Use Scalability and Automation?

The Cloud is well known for its scalability and automation options, amongst other benefits. If you are using AWS, then you will soon understand that you have the opportunity to design a scalable infrastructure, right at the initial stage, which can help support increased traffic, while allowing you to retain your efficiency model. You have the liberty and flexibility to scale horizontally and vertically, depending on the resource availability. These are some excellent discussions which can be looked at, right during the planning stage, as these are primary factors worth considering in the long run.

How does Software Licensing Work?

Software licensing might look like a cake walk, but the reality is far from it. After moving into the Cloud, your software might need some additional licensing, which might not be available as and when you need it; this can be discussed with the Cloud vendor, at the time of negotiations. Licensing might seem like a big step, involving heavy financial budgeting; make sure you speak to your legal and business teams, before finalizing the list of software to be moved to the Cloud.

How Can We Make the Transition?

One has to understand that moving to the Cloud is no simple task. Having said this, it is essential to decide the migration plan, and what all it will entail. There is a lot of critical planning which goes into determining the type of Cloud service to undertake; an organization needs to weigh the pros and cons of each kind of Cloud model, and accordingly make a move. There are three types of Cloud services which are currently prominent: private, public, and hybrid. As per the cost, security needs, and other factors, an organization can narrow down the options and choose the one with the best fit.

What About Training Staff to Work in the Cloud?

While this might seem to be a bit overrated, it’s nonetheless essential to train your staff to work on the Cloud more seamlessly and efficiently. Rest assured, your team would face a few teething issues, considering the exposure to an altogether new environment, which might not seem as conducive in the beginning, as you might want it to be. Identify the teams which will be on-boarded to the Cloud first, and create elaborate training manuals to help the teams move forward and adopt the Cloud to the best possible extent.

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Infographic: Cloud Migration Overview and Benefits

Cloud Migration Overview and Benefits: Know more about cloud migration facts and figures, business benefits of cloud migration, how to calculate migration cost and cloud migration investments. See the below infographic for more details.

Infographic: Cloud Migration Overview and Benefits

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Best Practices to Help your Team Migrate to the Cloud

Best Practices to Help your Team Migrate to the Cloud

If any IT organization feels that shifting their workloads to the cloud is as simple as a lift and shift operation, then it must be noted that there is way more than what meets the eye. The cloud has become the preferred choice of services; from small businesses to large enterprises, organizations slowly realize the importance of shifting to the cloud. However, moving to the cloud is not as easy as it sounds; getting there needs extensive planning, forecasting, and lots of reconfiguring to ensure a successful transformation.

To get the most out of the cloud organizations need to be on their toes. To fully harness all that the cloud has to offer organizations need to direct their mindset towards resourcing, operational efficiency, and offline storage. Organizations which don’t consider these factors often end up losing heavily on productivity and in turn suffer from increased costs.

Pre-Migration Stage

Have a Vision Ready: Communicating a central vision to the team is of the utmost importance. It is essential to understand how the overall idea will pan out in the long run. Being able to share the vision with the employees can help the team assimilate the concept and work towards the successful migration eventually.

Share a Well-Defined Plan: By having a governance model ready, the migration can become easy. During the drafting of the project, any loopholes can be addressed through brainstorming sessions. All the questions which arise during the brainstorming sessions can then be answered preemptively.

Train Staff to Handle the Migration: Your team members should be well trained with the nuances of the cloud procedure; this way, everything can be handled without incurring any problems. The better-trained people you have on your side, the smoother the migration to the cloud. Well educated people can be an asset in such movements since they are already familiar with the problems that can occur during the migration procedures.

Migration Stage

Start Small: Don’t try to transfer everything in one go. Instead, concentrate on migrating in bits and pieces, so that everything can be moved without too many hiccups. Break more significant fragments into small segments and then try to migrate to the cloud. Rest assured, efficiency will be enhanced, and the team would be well equipped to transfer everything seamlessly.

Automation is the Key: Automation within the cloud is helpful when it comes to driving efficiency. Spend considerable time in automating the processes and functions within the cloud, so that teams can be empowered to perform and adjust to the migration effectively.

Leverage Fully Managed Services: Organizations can use services like Amazon RDS, Amazon DynamoDB, and the AWS Directory Service. Through AWS, day to day maintenance can be handled with ease, allowing the team to be freed up.

Post-Migration Stage

Monitor the Results: Post-migration, it’s important to stay abreast of all the changes that were initiated during the migration. Source the results, and the deviances, post-implementation strategies need to be developed to enhance the results and make them more effective. Any loopholes can be plugged, and the findings can pave the path for future migrations.

Use Cloud-Intensive Monitoring: There are a series of tools, which make the task of monitoring results more accessible and more straightforward. Tools like New Relic, App Dynamics, and AWS CloudWatch Logs are some examples of devices which can be used in this regard. Not only will the ops people benefit immensely in the long run, but stakeholders will also have a more precise base to make future strategies.

Cloud migration does not have to be a daunting job, as it is made out to be. With the right approach and techniques, the tasks can be eased out and can make the migration more natural and more effective. With the right partnership between ops and management, the movement to the cloud will be an asset worth maintaining.

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