How to move to the Cloud & Step-by-Step Guide on Hassle-Free Cloud Migration

Globally, organizations are taking up cloud migration to scale newer heights and become digitally competitive and reliable.

As businesses expand, so do their infrastructure needs. These businesses then find it difficult to invest and maintain traditional IT infrastructure, which is costly and time-consuming. In contrast, cloud computing is easier and faster, making scalability cost-effective as well.

However, an enterprise-level migration is a lengthy process, which in turn deters many from making the leap.

Here we have compiled a step-by-step guide to get you started and make the migration smoother and easier without affecting data and other applications.

Step 1 – Plan and Prepare along with Financials

The foremost step is to analyze why your business needs cloud migration, and how exactly cloud can benefit your business. It is important to be clear about your organizational goals and how cloud computing can help you achieve them.

It is important to note that, while the ability to reduce upfront costs by shifting IT spending to monthly fees is a major incentive to move to the cloud, it shouldn’t be your only business driver.

Step 2 – Assess and Choose Your Cloud Environment

Before you start your cloud migration, you have to decide what kind of cloud model is suitable according to your business need. You must choose whether you want to go for single or multi-cloud, public or private cloud, or a mix per your requirements.

• A single cloud environment uses a single cloud provider to serve the applications or services that the organization wants to migrate to the cloud.
• Single cloud environments can utilize either private or public clouds, using whichever one better serves current and future needs of the organization.
• On the other hand, in a multi-cloud environment, an organization uses multiple public cloud services from multiple different providers.

The different clouds are used for various tasks to achieve best-of-breed results or to reduce vendor lock-in. Multiple clouds also give organizations added peace of mind by minimizing dependence on any one provider, often decreasing costs and increasing flexibility.

Step 3 – Security in Place

While moving to the cloud, one of the most important considerations is cloud security. It is important to implement data security practices to prevent unauthorized access and threats.

Data security threats have been on the rise and will become more and more sophisticated as time goes on. This calls for the need to hire a reliable and trustworthy cloud service provider to ensure the best in class security.

Additionally, your organization itself must safeguard itself against potential threats by devising and implementing policies to regulate data in a cloud environment.

Step 4 – Migrate Data and Applications, and Review

Migrating your entire database and applications should be done in a planned way so that it goes smoothly and quickly.

To begin with, you should start with non-critical applications, such as office applications. This way you begin to acclimatize to the cloud environments, without endangering any critical data.

It is important to take care of security during the migration. Any temporary storages for your data should be as secure as the end destination. Cloud providers will most likely give you access to various cloud migration tools. Use them to help you with migration.

Even after you have finished the migration, there are a few more things to consider. Most important is resource optimization.

As you move into the cloud, make sure your teams have a plan for distributing resources to your application.

If you have any more questions about cloud migration, you can get in touch with our team here.