Cloud Migration: What You Need to Know to Make Your Migration Successful

Cloud technology isn’t a new concept anymore—but still—some companies are delaying their migration in favor of inefficient legacy systems. Cloud migration doesn’t have to be a hard process if you leverage the right solutions.

Whether it’s singular applications, larger server integrations, or a larger commitment, your company must have a cloud strategy in place.

But how do you approach cloud migration, and what should your strategy look like?

Are Your Clients Ready to Migrate?

It’s not as simple as clicking a button and migrating to the cloud. All of the departments in your organization must be ready. This includes all facets of your IT operations, from the day-to-day to cyber security concerns.

Before starting the cloud migration process, you should ask yourself a few questions:

• Do you have a cloud migration plan? This plan should detail exactly what needs to happen, how it will happen, what data you are migrating, and how long these processes will take. The plan can change as things move along or as objectives become clearer.
  
  
• Did you consider security for the transfer? Transferring your data over the Internet comes with inherent risks. Have your IT department assess your migration plan to ensure that none of your sensitive data gets leaked in the process.
  
  
• Will you maintain compliance? There may be compliance concerns to think about depending on the types of data that you are migrating. Determine if your transfer is compliant with relevant regulations like HIPAA, FISMA, and others (if applicable).
  
  
• Did you set a budget for your migration? The cloud offers infinite possibilities for scaling, budgets, and more. However, take the time to estimate the cost of your cloud migration before starting. This will help you better understand the process and manage expectations.
  
  
• Have you trained your teams? What good is using the cloud if your staff isn’t trained to use it properly? Your teams will require additional training to learn how to access essential data and other inputs that allow them to do their jobs.
  
  
• Do you have a way to track performance? Most companies migrate to the cloud to increase their operational efficiency and performance across departments. Take the time to track performance across your organization to ensure that these changes are performing as expected.
  
  
• Have you implemented a system to monitor your migration? Don’t forget about the importance of end-to-end monitoring. You must monitor every stage of the migration—including pre-migration, baseline, mid-migration, and post-migration. There is a lot of data to capture in order to validate the success of your cloud migration initiative.
  
  
• Answering these questions will help your organization plan an efficient migration that protects your valuable data, educates key stakeholders, and reduces the operational impact that a migration will have on your company.

Being Competitive Means Adopting the Cloud

The digital landscape is competitive, and your company is battling for market share against newer companies that were born into the cloud era.

Competing with these companies is challenging when you are relying on legacy systems that weren’t designed to compete against cloud technology.

But trusting another company’s architecture, even if these companies are Amazon, Microsoft, and Google is difficult. Your IT departments want to maintain control through every step of the process. Yet, that’s hard in a world that’s dominated by complex IT infrastructures that include mainframes, client-servers, virtualizes, server-less, and hybrid cloud platforms that utilize Kubernetes, containers, and micro-services.

The only way to ensure that all of your systems are safe, secure, and running optimally is to leverage platforms that are data-driven.

Here at Solsys, we believe Splunk is one solution that more companies should use to search for, analyze, and visualize the large amounts of data that their business is producing. Accessing and visualizing this data is essential if you want to make sensible IT decisions that will impact your entire organization.

What Cloud Migration Best Practices Should You Consider?

The biggest fear companies have when migrating to the cloud is losing infrastructure control. The idea of moving from “owning” to “renting” is challenging at first.

Here are a few best practices that you should consider:

• Define your performance expectations. Measure your baseline performance before you start your migration. This will serve as a useful benchmark to validate your successes and failures. Keep in mind, certain aspects of your business may experience performance losses post-migration that may be offset by gains elsewhere. Measure all of these changes to see if they have affected the overall user experience.
  
  
• Leverage identity and access monitoring solutions. The cloud is more accessible, but that accessibility comes with increased risks. Transferring all of your company’s sensitive information comes with its own unique set of challenges. Identity and access monitoring solutions help you track who, how, and where your data is being accessed and provide your organization with visualized, deep level insights.
  
  
• Embrace automation to cut costs. Sophisticated algorithms can help your company cut costs. Whether they are assessing market prices for essential materials, identifying wasted resources, or more efficient solutions, you need a reliable solution that can help you identify areas where you can improve your operational efficiency.
  
  
• Create a culture of collaboration. Hybrid cloud environments are designed to unify your teams by creating a seamless migration process. They allow multiple teams to access the same data from the same dashboards. This makes it easier for you to set goals, track KPIs, manage security threats, and monitor essential business services and processes. Unifying your IT, security, and business teams will increase the cohesion between these teams.

Make Better Use of Your Most Valuable Asset

The data you’ve spent years collecting is the most valuable asset your company has. Migrating to the cloud will allow your company to make better use of that data.

With enhanced search functionality, the ability to assess and analyze data, and to visualize it will improve your company’s operational efficiency, ability to make decisions, and the way your teams interact with one another.

Are you interested in learning more about cloud migration and how your company can make the transition? Contact the Solsys team today to learn more.