July 21, 2021

Don’t Forget These 5 Steps Before Migrating to the Cloud

by: Align

The pandemic put cloud migration on a fast-track, and businesses can’t seem to make the transformation soon enough. Gartner predicts the global public cloud services market will grow by $88.2 billion from 2020 through 2022. And because the cloud offers extensive benefits—like application modernization, scalability and flexibility—it isn’t surprising so many businesses are anticipating making this move.  

However, cloud migration also requires rigorous preparation. Errors made during the cloud migration planning process can cause service outages, cost money and have a negative impact to end users. 

Follow these tips to plan better, operate more simply and move more efficiently during your migration.  

Gain Business Sponsor Support

Leadership buy-in for cloud migration is essential for getting budget sign-off, as well as a successful transformation. First, you must identify an executive sponsor (a CTO or a CIO) who can help lead cultural shift within your organization. Then, you must clearly communicate the migration goals and outcomes as an objective for your business in order to get sponsor support. 

Here's a tip: Cloud migration use-cases can help drive the decision process, e.g., cost savings, security, governance, productivity and collaboration gains, and more.  

Build a Migration Strategy

Before migrating, companies need to outline a plan to determine how to approach each of the applications in their portfolio. Consider how your workloads will be transformed based on the "6 R’s”: 

This requires performing some enhancements to the workload that is offered by the cloud without fully re-architecting the design. (3)

Partner with a Trusted Cloud Vendor

Cloud migrations encompass more than just infrastructure; it sets a foundation for future security, data flow and system integration. A qualified partner expertly leaves behind no loose ends, providing critical support and saving on time and cost. Before instigating a migration, make sure your company performs proper due diligence for vendor that bests fits your business IT operating model.  

Design for a Hybrid Approach

If possible, when strategizing for your cloud migration, design for a hybrid approach in order to connect your on-site infrastructure to the cloud vendor of choice. Doing this will provide your organization with options in case some workloads need to be retained, as well as allow your organization time to adapt to changes in the operational model.  

Map a Migration Process

Always follow a proper path to migration. Short cuts will only cost you time and impact your business. Follow these migration steps:  

  • Current State – Perform requirements gathering and a Discovery & Assessment of your current IT infrastructure and estate. 
  • Future State – Develop a thorough migration strategy, prioritizing the 6 R’s and the actual design & build to progress toward your optimal end-state.  
  • Migration – Plan your migration event, have your team tabletop planning discussion, have a rollback plan, organize the teams for execution and delivery, and set up the migration schedule and timeframe.  

Embarking to the cloud is a major business initiative in digitally transforming your operations. Align's project teams have successfully migrated over 500,000 servers and applications. Our proven framework includes the governance, process and tools to collect, store and analyze application and infrastructure technology to support future state transformations, and guide you through every stage in your migration journey. 

Contact Us ➜

Continue Reading

Related Articles

★★★★★

“Align is our trusted provider for all our Managed Services and cybersecurity needs. They provide us best-in-class IT services that not only help drive productivity and growth, but ensure we meet both current and evolving compliance and security requirements with ease. As consultants to financial advisors, trust and reliability are indispensable to our operations, which is why we never hesitate to refer Align to our very own client base. Align isn’t just our partner, they are an extension of our team. We look forward to entrusting them with our IT infrastructure for years to come.”

Ed Fasano - Experienced Advisory Consultants LLC