Seven points to ponder over before moving to the Clouds.

Migration to the cloud involves transferring all or part of an IT infrastructure from on-premise to cloud environments. As your organization prepares for cloud migration, it is vital that your IT team maintains a comprehensive view of all infrastructure components and available options for migrating each workload.

Cloud migration lets you use a cloud provider’s infrastructure to reduce IT costs, scale faster, make your services available anywhere, and deliver better customer experiences. The better you understand what you’re working with, the easier project planning and execution becomes. Migrating complex IT systems should be done incrementally.

It is important to understand that cloud migrations can be a risky undertaking. If poorly executed, a migration can result in loss of data,?cybersecurity breaches, and high latency, among other issues.

These are some common pitfalls that need to be avoided before cloud migration.

• Choosing the wrong cloud platform
• Wrong prioritization of business processes that should be migrated to the cloud
• Sketching ambitious plans that are beyond the bandwidth and the capabilities of the organization

Here is a breakdown of the crucial aspects of implementing a cloud migration strategy.

• Identify Your Needs

One of the first steps to consider before migrating data to the cloud is to determine the use case that the cloud will serve. It is important to assess your environment and determine the factors that will govern the migration, such as critical application data, legacy data, and application interoperability. Determining these requirements will help you charter a solid plan for the tools you’ll need during migration.

• Choose the Type of Cloud Service

The types of cloud services can be categorized into?public, private, and hybrid. Businesses can choose which type of cloud works best for them depending on their needs. They differ based on how data is stored, how data sharing and interactions occur and how cloud-defined applications run.?

• Assess Current and Future Applications

The assessment phase is the first phase in your migration to where you determine the requirements and dependencies to migrate your apps. The assessment phase is crucial for the success of your migration. You need to gain deep knowledge about the apps you want to migrate, their requirements, their dependencies, and about your current environment.

• Choose the Right Service Provider

It is vital to find a cloud service provider with deep domain expertise and a proven ability to execute. Look for a differentiated portfolio, one that shows a depth and breadth of capabilities. An organization with a long-term vision and a clear, tightly integrated roadmap and release plan can assuage security concerns.

• Prep the Organization for Migration

Check if your organization has the talent and skills to carry out a move to the cloud. This seems simple enough, but many organizations are hamstrung by a lack of IT talent. It is a good idea to train your in-house IT staff to ensure they have a grasp of your cloud migration strategy. Training your IT personnel will also help you upskill your general workforce, ensuring they have the skills to make the most of your new cloud environment.

• Manage a Hybrid Model

The hybrid cloud is a single and multiple tenancy models that has both private and public exposure and is located inside the organization’s network as well as the service provider’s location.?Benefits of hybrid cloud include control of sensitive assets as required; flexibility of additional resources in the public cloud as needed; cost-effectiveness for the ability to scale in the public cloud; ease of transitioning between the two clouds as needed.

• Kickstart the Migration Process

Organizations looking to migrate to the cloud should consider which migration strategy best answers their needs. Here are some cloud migration strategies to consider:

1. Rehost
2. Refactor
3. Revise
4. Rebuild

Check out this eBook on Cloud Migration for more information.