Checklist for Successful Cloud Migration

Aug 26, 2020

Checklist for Successful Cloud Migration – Moving from on-premises to cloud is often full of complexities. There are several checkpoints, the fulfillment of which ensures a successful cloud migration. Achieving digital transformation requires in-depth planning and insightful decision making at the fundamental level. The efficient utilization of resources, better management of risks/ operations, easily accessible from anywhere, and quick load time of applications are some of the factors that organizations look forward to achieving with cloud migration.

This blog put before you an ideal approach of cloud migration that can fetch efficient results and can also help in saving time and cost.

The Checklist of Successful Cloud Migration is as follows:
  1. Defining the key metrics
  2. Deciding cloud strategies
  3. Deciding on cloud deployment
  4. Determining the applications for cloud migration and forecasting cost
  5. Ensuring business continuity during migration
  6. Adherence to compliances and standards
  7. Decide the executing strategy of cloud migration
1. Defining the key metrics

Knowing what you want to achieve through cloud migration is the first step in the journey of cloud migration. You need to evaluate the current state of your applications, to decide the KPI’s for cloud migration. Some of the KPIs can be- monitoring the CPU usage, measurement of the response time, availability of the memory space, and time incurred in page loading. These are some critical metrics that determine the user experience, infrastructure, customer engagement, and application performance of the whole digital set up and thus become crucial for assessing the success of the cloud migration.

The enterprise demand for cloud migration will grow at a CAGR of 30% over the period 2020-25.
–based on the latest research
2. Embarking on the latest cloud strategies

Some of the noted cloud migration strategies commonly referred to as the R’s of migration are among the best methodologies adopted in the current scenario. Let’s understand each holistic approach.
Rehosting: – Popularly known as ‘lift & shift’, this methodology migrates the data and application to the cloud with minimal effort. It typically moves the virtual servers into an IaaS Solution and offers the scope to re-architect the cloud solution in the future.
Retire: – Some applications and services need phasing out. In this strategy, we identify the elements having the least value-proposition and mark them as “retired.”
Retain: – Enterprise can’t migrate every application to the cloud. While some workforces move, others get retained on-premises. Generally, hybrid cloud services adopt this methodology.
Replatform: – This strategy migrates only a part of the application components to the cloud and helps establish compatibility between the IT system and the cloud infrastructure.
Refactoring: – Here, the features and service offerings of the existing application are remodeled and made highly scalable. Though expensive, this strategy improves business continuity and agility.
Repurchase: – The cloud service provider offering cloud-based SaaS services adopts this strategy. The cloud experts articulate the user’s data and applications into the cloud-based product and thus manage the business operations.

3. Deciding on your cloud deployment

The type of cloud environment plays a crucial role in the success of cloud migration. Enterprise needs to decide whether they would like to go for a private, public, or hybrid model. While the private cloud environment offers the best of the security features, the public cloud environment enriches you with the best of flexibility and scalability, and the hybrid cloud environment, which is a combination of private and public cloud services, provides the right mix of services to the business.

For Cloud services check our offering here

4. Determining the applications for cloud migration and forecasting cost

It is always good to find the business impact of moving a specific application to the cloud.
Some of the important areas here are:

• Initiate the task by identifying applications that are fit for migration. While some of these can be migrated as-is, some require redesigning and restructuring before migration.
• If the redesigning and restructuring becomes mandatory for the applications, then cost related to it should be ascertained. Thereafter, ROI (return on investment) is calculated to find whether the migration is in favor or not.

5. Ensuring business continuity during migration

The dependence of one process on another is quite common during cloud migration. Organizations looking for cloud movement should find out these dependencies during the planning phase and make sure it does not impact the business processes while the migration is going.

6. Efficient adherence to compliances and standards

Once the business has identified the workloads and applications for the migration, they need to plan out the procedure for their migration. The process adopted for cloud migration should abide by the data integrity, related security, and compliance standards of the business.

The following points help build the right roadmap for security and compliances related issues during migration.

• The strategy that accounts for safe and secured migration should be well-defined and must follow the set compliances of the organization.
• The enterprise, along with the cloud experts, should continuously monitor the organization’s compliances and the security gaps and should work towards mitigating the risks if any.

7. Executing the final lap of cloud migration

The complexity of the applications and data architecture plays a pivotal role in determining the ease of migration. The cloud migration process adopted by the enterprise depends to a large extent on the data and the application architecture. Either the service providers can follow the piecemeal approach of migration, where each process is validated and tested, and then the second process continues, or they can migrate the entire application in one go, depending on the business ease and flexibility.

Conclusion

Checklist for Successful Cloud Migration
It’s the right time to start the Cloud Migration journey. Cloud technologies play a leading role in digitally transforming the business enterprise. A planned migration not only simplifies the journey of the cloud movement but also unlocks the possibilities and hidden potential of the business. Following the to-do list of cloud migration, strategically prepares you to make a successful move to the cloud environment. It also proactively prepares the enterprises of the challenges that they might face while migrating data and applications.


Share This Article

About Bizmetric

Bizmetric offers a reliable data analytics platform, covering the wide spectrum of data bionics to deliver insightful business outcomes. We implement practices that underpin a bright digital future.

marketing@bizmetric.com