December 05
As more organizations shift their workloads and assets to the cloud, a comprehensive cloud migration plan is necessary for organizations to adapt to the evolving business landscape. Cloud migration plans can save your organization time and money during the transition to the cloud, boosting your revenue and efficiency.
First, we’ll discuss cloud migration best practices, how you can implement them, and common considerations and challenges that will help you build a successful migration strategy for your digital transformation.
What Is a Cloud Migration Plan?
Cloud migration is the act of moving data, resources, and applications to a cloud environment, sometimes from a legacy infrastructure or an on-premises data center. The best practice to deploy before migrating is to create a personalized cloud migration plan for your company.
Creating a cloud migration plan is essential to ensure:
- Digital assets upload correctly.
- You don’t overspend and go over budget.
- Your business operations aren’t disrupted.
Without the right cloud migration strategy, you risk losing money and hindering your company’s operations.
With proper guidance and applied experience during the planning phase, your organization can begin a seamless migration process.
Considerations During Planning
Before you begin to move your organization’s assets to the cloud, you should first ask these five cloud migration strategy questions:
- What do I wish to accomplish by migrating?
- Which cloud solutions fit our needs?
- Which assets should be migrated first?
- What security measures should we establish?
- How will this affect our budget?
Additionally, there are a few challenges to keep in mind:
Security. Protect workloads and assets with a zero-trust approach during the migration process.
Compliance. Regulations are different for location and industry; however, you should ensure your data-management practices comply with industry standards during and after cloud migration.
Resource management. Each organization handles the deprovisioning of all assets no longer in use so that they don’t continue to waste resources and money.
Integration. When migrating custom or third-party applications, you should understand how they will interact with your cloud platform to ensure your operations can resume after the transition without issue.
There are other considerations and challenges to be cautious of that a cloud services provider can help with. They can provide additional insight and use the best cloud migration practices for your company’s needs.
Cloud Migration Steps To Include in Your Plan
There are four cloud migration steps to ensure the best transition:
1. Assess
The first step in your cloud migration project plan should be to understand the migration process itself. A guide or third-party cloud-managed service provider (MSP) can help by assessing your organization’s needs and goals.
By understanding the digital transformation your company will undergo, you can organize your business’s data, including what applications you have and how they integrate. You can then pinpoint the most important ones to migrate first.
2. Plan
Next, plan and sort your applications and data by migration effort. This will allow you to prioritize and organize the order you should migrate them.
Furthermore, it’s important to examine how much your assets are used and transition that information to the cloud. This will help keep operations stable during the transition to the cloud.
3. Migrate
After you’ve assessed your digital assets and planned the order of their migration, you are ready to begin migrating them to the cloud.
Most organizations are eager to begin migrating their data, however, it takes proper preparation and specialized experience. It’s crucial to have a quick transition that allows maximum uptime, minimal resource requirement, and migrates complex applications with ease.
4. Optimize
Once you’ve uploaded your assets to the cloud, it’s important to then configure your applications and settings that will give your enterprise the best scalability for daily operations.
Different cloud-managed service providers offer different features and capabilities, so it’s important to communicate with them to figure out how you can optimize your organization’s operations. They should work with you to reach an outcome that gives your company the resources and tools necessary to operate at peak efficiency.
Make Your Migration to the Cloud Simple With Evoque
Every organization is different and has varying needs for their company to successfully migrate to a cloud platform. A company’s cloud migration plan created with a provider should be tailored to match these needs for the best migration experience. With the correct strategy, you can boost your productivity and revenue, streamline tasks, and manage your operations from a single cloud location.
Evoque offers a seamless implementation of your cloud migration project plan backed by world-class expertise and customer service.
Learn more about cloud best practices and how we can transform and modernize your company for years to come.
