Cloud technology solutions are continuing to revolutionize industries, and the chances of this trend disappearing are next to impossible. So, developing a plan to ensure a successful migration has become increasingly essential for companies that want to move their digital resources and assets to the cloud.
No matter what size your business is, or your service offerings, cloud environments will support your endeavors 24/7/365. This guide will go over the nature of cloud migrations, along with providing you with all the information you need to make the process as smooth and successful as possible.
What is a cloud migration?
A cloud migration is when organizations move their existing applications, data, and other IT assets to a cloud-based infrastructure. In simpler terms, it means moving your business’s digital technologies and data from in-house solutions to the cloud. Companies can migrate to different cloud models—multi-clouds, public clouds, hybrid clouds, or private clouds—depending on their needs.
A cloud migration plan is a strategy that explains how an organization will move its data and applications to the cloud. Without a comprehensive strategy guiding their cloud migration, businesses will likely experience delays, security risks, oversights, and other consequences.
Benefits of migrating to the cloud
Migrating to the cloud offers many benefits to organizations, including:
- Increased efficiency: Cloud-based systems can streamline business processes and workflows, making them more efficient.
- Enhanced scalability: Since cloud technology solutions are inherently scalable, businesses can easily scale their resources up and down whenever necessary.
- Increased flexibility: The cloud allows companies to access their data and applications from anywhere, at any time, and on any device.
- Improved disaster recovery: The cloud can innovate your disaster recovery efforts.
- Reduced costs: With the cloud, businesses can avoid the costs associated with purchasing and maintaining additional hardware and software. Instead, they can pay for a predictable subscription to cloud resources.
How can companies prepare for a cloud migration?
There are several actions you need to take before moving to the cloud—performing them will make the overall experience more seamless.
1. Identify your cloud migration goals
Documenting your objectives will help you uncover what you want to achieve by moving to the cloud. Goals will offer your organization guidance throughout its migration journey.
Your goals could be:
- Improving IT efficiency and agility.
- Reducing IT costs.
- Enhancing security and compliance.
- Improving scalability and flexibility.
- Enabling remote work and collaboration.
When developing goals, you should reach out to your team members to gain a deeper understanding of what your business requires from a cloud-based IT environment. The more input you receive, the more relevant your objectives will be.
2. Analyze your digital assets
Examining your IT environment will help you determine what hardware, data, and applications you have, how they are currently being used, and what migrating them to the cloud would mean for your technologies’ performance.
You should look at how individual solutions connect with each other, and what data they support. By analyzing your digital assets, you will be able to determine which of them are top priorities for migration.
3. Choose the right cloud migration strategy
Migration strategies are the approaches businesses can take to guide their cloud migration plans. A strategy should be chosen based on your organization’s goals, needs, and resources.
Some of these strategies are:
- Lift and shift (rehosting): Involves moving your assets from on-premises systems to the cloud without making any significant changes.
- Replatforming: Involves making some changes to your assets to ensure they are cloud-compatible. Apart from that, this approach is somewhat similar to lift and shift.
- Refactoring: Involves re-architecting your company's applications so they can take full advantage of the cloud.
The right strategy can help simplify the complexities of cloud migrations, giving businesses the foresight to plan for their future data migration and IT transferral efforts. But at the same time, selecting a strategy and putting it into action takes more than copying and pasting some files.
It is a delicate process that calls for high levels of expertise in the cloud, business, and data security—companies that specialize in the cloud provide this and offer much more.
4. Invest in a cloud migration services provider
A cloud migration services provider is an organization that specializes in administering transitional cloud services for companies.
A cloud-focused services provider can help you with the following:
- Migration preparation (including backing up data to off-premises data centers).
- Monitoring and managing the migration process.
- Selecting the best cloud service provider (Azure, Google Cloud, etc.) and infrastructure.
- Providing testing, ongoing support, and maintenance.
By investing in a services provider, you will avoid making common cloud migration mistakes and be rewarded with a successful migration.
Adopt the power of cloud technology solutions with a foolproof cloud migration plan
Moving to the cloud can be a challenging process, but it can be simplified with an effective cloud migration plan. The cloud experts at Davenport Group have the expertise and tools businesses need to plan for and move their digital assets to the cloud. Talk to the team today to elevate your IT environment and enhance your organization’s performance with cloud technology solutions.
