Migrating your company's computing resources to the cloud is a great way to save money while gaining flexibility and capacity for your technology infrastructure. The first benefit is obvious: you don't have to worry about housing all of your servers and other equipment. In addition, you can refocus your employees who were once responsible for maintaining hardware or spend hours researching before making purchase orders. But how can you ensure that your migration is as smooth as possible?
Cloud migrations are not without challenges, but if you take the time to develop a thoughtful plan that realizes your technology and business strategy, you'll be ahead of the game.
If you're not careful, migrating to the cloud can cause more problems than it solves. For example, the ease of provisioning cloud services might lead your company to end up with several vendors and total chaos as you try to integrate and manage disparate clouds. Similarly, not planning for cloud-specific security considerations might open your new cloud up to an unforeseen attack vector.
In short, the old saying "failing to plan is planning to fail" is especially true when migrating resources to the cloud. A thoughtful migration plan following four basic steps can make the difference between a straightforward and smooth migration, and unforeseen surprises along the way.
A successful cloud migration starts with understanding the motives for why you want to migrate to the cloud in the first place. Is your main focus to save on costs? Is improved technology performance and flexibility crucial to your organization’s success? Do you have an upcoming product launch that requires cloud support? Keep these objectives in mind during your migration process.
Your strategy should also take into account which vendor or vendors you will use to host your cloud environment, as well as how you will approach calculating and managing the costs. It's important to have a plan for this because it can be difficult to compare cloud and on-site hosting costs and having a clear baseline and metrics will help you evaluate your progress later.
Your cloud migration plan should be a balance of detailed precision with a foundation that meets your company's needs in the long run. Your plan should also include any configurations that will allow your workloads to expand or provides additional functionality that will make future application deployments or development activities easier.
Since cloud migrations can be transparent to end users or might require their action, be sure to include any needed updates to users and key stakeholders in your planning.
Many teams regard execution as the most challenging phase of any project, but it doesn't have to be as daunting as it seems. If steps 1 and 2 are done thoroughly and effectively, execution should largely be carried out on autopilot. For most cloud migrations, execution starts with lower-level services, including account setup, networking and firewall rules, and infrastructure migration. Once these core infrastructure components are configured and migrated, proceed to critical services like Active Directory, databases, web services, and file shares. With a solid plan in place, executing a cloud migration can be smooth and seamless.
The final step of any technology project is often overlooked, but it can be one of the most important parts, especially in a cloud migration. Once the plan is executed, it's easy to think that the migration is done and that you can disperse the team and end the effort. However, this would be a mistake since there are usually optimizations that can be made in the short and long term. Additionally, bumps in the road during the migration might require corrective action.
Most of us are familiar with the benefits of cloud computing. The variety of architectures that range from fully cloud-hosted computing to various hybrid models allows all manner of workloads and organizations to take advantage of the cloud. Some effort in identifying your strategy and developing a detailed and considered plan can make the migration painless, and some investment in optimization will allow the benefits of the cloud to accrue even faster.
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