How Do I Develop An Effective Cloud Migration Strategy?

Whether it is for improved scalability or lowering operational costs, there are multiple reasonswhy any business decides to implement an effective cloud migration strategy. Having said that,it is not easy to fully leverage the benefits of having your entire IT infrastructure and applications on your own cloud premises.

A 2019 study reveals that over 50% of cloud migration projects either exceed their budget orhave a flawed implementation. Be it a Windows Cloud or a Linux Cloud platform, how do yougo about developing an effective cloud migration strategy? Here are five of the industry-proven best practises:

1.Determine the purpose of migrating to the cloud.

This is, by far, the most important and determining step in cloud migration. What is the overallobjective of moving your IT infrastructure to the cloud? The reasons could be many — costreduction, scalability, improved performance, or enhanced security. Before working on your cloud migration strategy, determine its purpose along with the benefits for your organisation. Ensure that you have the support of all your business stakeholders and that they understand the value of efficiency and performance that your business can avail of.Apart from the overall purpose, a SWOT (Strengths-Weaknesses-Opportunities-Threats) analysiscan help you determine the outcome of this plan — and help in figuring if it is worth the trouble.

2.Evaluate your current IT environment.

Improper planning is one of the reasons for the failure of most cloud migration initiatives.Before implementing a migration strategy, evaluate your current IT environment, including your running applications. This involves answering the following questions:

●What needs to be migrated first and later?

●Which applications need to be migrated?

●Which applications need to be updated to be made compatible on the cloud?

●What is the expected cost and resources expected to be utilised for the entire migration?

●What is the right cloud deployment model that is suitable for your infrastructure?

Infrastructure-as-a-Service (IaaS), Platform-as-a-Service (PaaS), or Software-as-a-Service(SaaS)Among the many challenges of cloud migration, business enterprises often underestimate the overall cost of migration. While cloud computing can be economical on its own, you also need to consider the overall cost of ownership — that include costs related to storage, computing, and additional resources. As India’s largest cloud computing provider, E2E Cloud reduces your overall ownership costs by providing a cloud solution designed for your requirements.

3.Evaluate the applications to be moved to the cloud.

An effective cloud migration strategy should include a plan for the smooth migration of all your in-house applications from your physical IT setup to the cloud platform. As an example, you can assign the top priority to applications that cannot have a downtime of more than 15 minutes and will have the most impact on your business operations. Additionally, for each application, consult or inform the team or personnel working on them — to avoid any future troubleshooting issues. Calculating each application’s exact computing capacity can help you determine the cloud compute capacity that it needs and help you save money on your cloud computing resources.

Other application-related strategies typically include:

●About rehosting your applications on an IaaS platform.

●Re-architecting or refactoring your applications on a PaaS platform.

●Or even replacing your application with a suitable SaaS tool.

4.Partner with the right cloud migration provider.

To implement a seamless migration of your business data to the cloud, you need to consult the right cloud solutions provider with industry experience in cloud migration. In most cases, selecting the vendor can be the difference between ultimate success and failure. Apart from the implementation costs, evaluate your cloud migration vendor on other factors like supported platforms and technologies, customer service, and certification. As a rule, avoid partnering with cloud computing services who try to lure you with their cheap packages. Many cloud vendors charge additional fees for higher storage, computing power, or

higher traffic. On its part, E2E Cloud offers affordable cloud computing services that are configured to handle small and large workloads.

5.Supervise the overall migration process.

A successful cloud migration also depends on the steps you take before and after the implementation. This includes tasks like taking data backups before the migration, configuring the right cloud environment, the actual deployment, and finally, testing and monitoring the impact of the migration on your business goals. To avoid any future setbacks, check how your cloud migration partner is ensuring high uptime and is applying regular software updates to your hosted applications and tools.

Conclusion

Migrating to the cloud can be beneficial — only when it is implemented with the correct strategy and the right cloud computing provider. E2E Cloud + Migration Vendor can be a right choice if you are considering moving to cloud.Interested?Sign up https://bit.ly/3tQIr8S with us here with all your details.