How to Make an Effortless Cloud Migration Plan – Checklist & Guide: A blog about how to make a cloud migration plan to ensure a smooth migration.
In today’s competitive climate, businesses need to capitalize on the benefits of moving to the cloud in order to drive digital change and improve overall operations.
Now that cloud computing has become a standard in the enterprise space, we are seeing more and more businesses moving towards it. In many areas, the need to migrate to cloud is so pressing that some people would rather move forward with one or two unknown risks than remain in their current hosting environment. While this can have its risks, migrating to the cloud also has numerous upsides which makes it worthwhile to consider. It’s just important to approach this process with a clear plan and methodology in place – one that not only takes into account IT implications but business as well.
Many companies — in nearly every industry — are increasingly adopting cloud technologies. In fact, 94 percent of organizations are using cloud services in some way.
For most businesses, the decision to migrate to the cloud is a natural progression: It’s an opportunity to modernize IT infrastructure, increase operational efficiency and create a more flexible and scalable environment for future growth. It’s also a chance to take advantage of improved disaster recovery capabilities that enable faster resumption of operations without costly in-house data centers.
But while there is plenty of evidence that moving to the cloud can save money and improve business agility, there are risks associated with any major transition. So when you’re considering a move to the cloud, it’s important to make sure you have a clear understanding of the challenges involved. Here are three steps that will help you navigate a successful migration or transition:
There are three key steps to successful cloud migration:
- Prepare the apps for cloud deployment
- Deploy the app to an elastic, scalable, pay-as-you-go environment
- Monitor and scale apps in real-time
When you’re moving applications to the cloud, you need to choose the right application architecture. The good news is that there are proven patterns you can use to create a hybrid cloud solution. You need to divide and conquer by segmenting your apps into different categories based on their workload type, maturity, organizational alignment, and business value. Then you can optimize them for their specific needs by selecting the right architecture model.
The following are some of the most commonly used approaches to modernizing enterprise applications:
Refactor Applications: Make sure they’re optimized for cloud deployment by breaking them down into smaller pieces with distributed architectures (microservices) and using container technology such as Docker and Kubernetes (modernize with containers) or PaaS solutions such as AWS Lambda (modernize with serverless). This is a great approach for legacy applications that have a long lifecycle but aren’t being maintained regularly because it helps overcome many of the issues.
When planning a cloud migration, there are many things to consider. Which applications should be moved? Should the entire data center be migrated? What are the costs and benefits of various cloud scenarios (e.g., public, private and hybrid clouds)?
To help you cover all your bases, here’s a quick checklist for cloud migration:
Step 1: Identity what you want to migrate. This is perhaps the most important thing to decide as it will impact how much time and money it takes to migrate.
Step 2: Determine if you want a hybrid or single-cloud solution. Hybrid solutions can be more costly in terms of time and money, but might make sense for certain applications.
Step 3: Create a proof of concept (PoC) plan that explains how your application will perform in the cloud. This will give you real-world insight before committing to a full migration.
Step 4: Create a migration plan that includes step-by-step instructions on how you will move applications and data, who will do it, when it will be done, etc.
Step 5: Test everything prior to migration. Then once your application is migrated into the cloud, test again to make sure everything works properly in this new environment.
Hopefully, this guide has provided you with the basic knowledge necessary to successfully cloud migrate your business or organization. While the process can be difficult, it also presents many advantages to businesses and organizations that are willing to weather the transition period. If this article was helpful to you, please feel free to share it on social media websites. This will help us reach out to more readers who could benefit from this information and help them decide if cloud migration is right for their business. Connect us for more information.
