Planning is always necessary whether it is planning a marketing strategy or planning a right cloud migration plan. Migrating to the cloud may seem to be straightforward and either your company is in the process of moving or will be in short order.
But, how to built a proper cloud migration plan for your business that is absolutely right? In this article, we will be discussing the planning phase of cloud migration. While some companies get trapped and stuck in this process, most of them are also benefited from their cloud server migration. The difference here is simple – a right cloud migration plan.
The right planned solution is always unique and always personal. You with your IT team must decide what are the services or applications you need to migrate to the cloud environment and how much will be the cost of this shifting. In reality, migration to the cloud is never one to one. By your unique aspects of your business, the business strategy will be shaped.
Just like the same way, no one size fits all marketing plan and no one size fits the marketing plan fro any organization. Similarly, no size fits your cloud migration plan.
What’s Your Cloud Migration Depends On?
By now you must be clear that your strategy of cloud migration must be unique and promising. Your migration will be depending on three things:
- What is your goal for migration?
- Assets you are moving to the cloud and what exactly are their requirements.
- The level of execution and support does your cloud service provider promises to offer along with the Service Level Agreement (SLAs).
You must be completely clear with the goal of migration and must be hard copied as that is the only thing which is going to decide the complete plan of cloud migration. The assets you are migrating will be deciding the overall costing and you should not migrate sensible applications that use confidential data.
If you go with top cloud providers like Amazon, you definitely get better support and execution but will be slightly costlier than others.
Why Needed a Unique Cloud Migration Plan?
The assessment of the migration plan can be started with simple questions. Will it be more cost-effective? Can I take risk of migrating my confidential data to the cloud platform? Is it more reliable? Will I get my resources back when I am completely finished? Is the system scalable?
All these questions might help you plan your business strategy but the biggest question can be, Is cloud migration going to help my business? If you cannot scale your business, no sense of migrating as at the end, money is the only thing that matters.
You have to understand how cloud migration can boost your business and the truth is that a key cloud project success totally depends on the operational details. The most difficult and complex part to be understood is your business and its unique needs.
Things to Know Before Starting Cloud Migration Process
There are some important things that must be known before starting the process of migration. By following this 7 step model of cloud migration, you will get a detailed view of each step and their significance.
Before starting, first, you have to draft a clear definition of your company cloud migration goals. A successful cloud migration can be an opportunity to clear out capital expenses along with providing better security of your data. Better security and performance may allow you to phase your legacy systems.
Before making any tactical decisions, just set your migrating strategy with these following questions.
- What is the reason for your migrating?
- What exactly you want to accomplish?
- How are you going to measure the success?
These questions need to be answered by each and every project stakeholders. This can help you save most of the time as you go forward.
How to Build a Migration Plan Which Everyone Can Follow
Simplicity is the key. A good cloud migration plan is simple and perfect. When your goals are clear and also your milestones, your path will always be correct. You can consider these steps for more accurate results.
- Establish a strong leader – Assign a project owner who has authority to demand execution and lead the team in the right direction.
- Schedule your check-ins – There should not be a gap between the leader and stakeholders, if it is, there will be voice potential problems between them which eventually affect the migration plan.
Validate Your Plan of Cloud Migration
Before validating first, make sure that you are not introducing any vulnerabilities. For that, you can go with test migrations before actual shifting and this will also help you to understand the actual time involved in completion of the whole process.
All your resources and applications must be tested and each and every customer you migrate may get some serious issues like hardware components problem or routing problems. You need technical support and different validation tools to test your new system properly.
The best way to test is moving the company’s backup environment to the cloud platform as your running system will not be affected by this step. Any bugs that are found in the testing and validating phase can be removed directly with ease. You can specify the size of resources actually needed and they can be scaled later.