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.
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.
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”:
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 a vendor that bests fits your business IT operating model.
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.
Always follow a proper path to migration. Short cuts will only cost you time and impact your business. Follow these migration steps:
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.