7 Essential Steps For A Successful Cloud Migration

Not every cloud migration is successful. Compared to other business process migration projects, failure rates are very high — as much as one in two. 

Migrating your business to the cloud involves careful planning so that you don’t experience any hiccups in the transition. Often, businesses spend time and effort on making more informed technology decisions. This is what we at Telligens Technologies refer to as the “Assessment” phase. 

Taking some time to consider your options and how they may affect your business as a whole can be an extremely beneficial move – as it will save you valuable time and money in the long run.

To help you avoid this fate, we’ve put together a list of eight essential steps you should take when doing your cloud migration assessment. These steps will make sure you don’t miss any important aspect of your existing IT environment and give you a good understanding of any IT challenges you’ll have to overcome in migrating your data and applications to the cloud.

Identify Your Business Goals and Objectives

As part of the project to migrate your infrastructure to the cloud, you need to define what your business goals are and how you want to address them in a way that will virtually eliminate your current pain points. 

Before you ask for a bid from an IT migration firm, it’s important to understand that you should not be looking for the “lowest price” but rather one that will work with you to move your business applications and infrastructure into the cloud in a way that will meet or exceed your objectives.

Perform an App Inventory

Have you ever done an application inventory? It’s only the second step and yet it’s incredibly important. Without conducting an application inventory, you’re essentially going into this cloud migration with a blindfold on and that’s a recipe for disaster. But with an app inventory, you’re able to identify what’ll work best and what needs to be changed in order to succeed.

Perform an inventory of servers, databases, and storage

If you’re thinking of moving your business to the cloud in the near future, there’s a good chance that you’ve already done some research into becoming “cloud aware.” While most businesses will only need to consider their present and foreseeable situations when it comes to cloud data services, others might want to start planning ahead. That’s because migrating current data sets to a cloud server could help your business become more agile than ever before. But before putting your cloud plans into motion, you’ll need to conduct an inventory of servers, databases, and storage — then decide which (if any) data should be moved over.

Create a dependency map for your apps

It is always best to do an assessment of your current cloud readiness with a dependency map. A dependency map maps the relationship between the applications and technologies in your environment and the servers they run on. It also maps any third-party applications that you need to take into account, such as CRM or collaboration apps. 

The best way to build a dependency map is to rely on user input and then use this to understand business needs. By mapping dependencies, you can understand what applications are critical for business purposes, whether there are any single points of failure in the architecture, the level of end-user interaction (SMEs need privileged access), and the complexity of each application’s codebase.

Craft a transition plan

Now that the refactoring is complete, you can create a transition plan for each component of your legacy application. This will usually consist of mapping the components to existing cloud services (which will drive some technology choices) while retiring or refactoring other components which do not match cloud paradigms.

Perform a future work assessment

Once you have determined which applications your organization is ready to migrate, it is time to review the requirements for those applications. Even if the application has already been migrated elsewhere, look at what will be needed – what hardware must be in place, how will it be configured, how many users, and so on.

Make final assessments

If you have read through the post thus far, you’ve got a high-level overview of the migration journey. It’s nearing time to step off the bus and hit the trail. There are many steps on this trail — it divides into multiple paths and there are always forks in the road — but it is a rewarding one when you reach your destination. 

Whether that is a more flexible and cost-effective infrastructure, accelerated innovation, streamlined business processes, sustained customer satisfaction, and loyalty, or a combination of some or all of these things is up to you!

So you’ve done the assessment and have a good idea of your cloud readiness, but now what? The clouds are lining up and you’re ready to migrate.

Takeaways:

Cloud migration can be a daunting task for businesses without the right guidance. It is imperative that your organization is aware of the risks and benefits of cloud migration, not just from cost management and internal resource requirements, but other changes that may result from migrating to the cloud.

Ready to move to the cloud? Our team of IT Consultants and Experts will assess whether your business is fit and ready to migrate to the cloud. We will check on your bandwidth, reliability, and security, as well as to conduct a thorough review of your applications, data, and infrastructure. After that, we will recommend the best strategies that will help facilitate a smooth cloud migration.

Once you’ve passed the assessment, allow us to help you identify the right applications for your business and provide all your service, support, and maintenance while increasing your productivity and meeting your budgetary requirements.

Learn more about client Migration by visiting www.telligens.com. Feel free to schedule a FREE CONSULTATION.