The ultimate guide to migrating to the cloud

In every business, there comes a time to enact change to better leverage technology. One example of this is cloud migration; however, many organizations struggle in making the shift. Cloud services have become a routine part of a company’s IT resources for years, enabling them to enhance efficiency, reduce costs, foster collaboration, and improve mobility. To get to the point where you can realize these, you’ll need to start with migrating to the cloud. Here’s how to do it right.

What is cloud migration?

Cloud migration describes moving an organization’s data, application, and workloads to a cloud infrastructure. Such migration may include public and private clouds, depending on your specific needs.

So, what’s driving cloud adoption? The usual motivators include cost optimization and flexibility. However, new trends are also emerging that are changing the ecosystem. Gartner notes that insufficient IaaS (infrastructure as a service) skills are lacking and urges businesses to migrate with managed service providers (MSPs).

Cloud migration steps

To ensure accuracy and security in your cloud migration, you’ll want to work with your MSP to accomplish these steps:

  1. Assess your current state of IT. If you don’t have the components of your network documented, this is an excellent opportunity. Before you can build a cloud migration strategy, you need to know the current state of your technology operations.
  2. Define your cloud strategy, including what you want to accomplish and the current challenges you need to resolve. You can also identify KPIs (key performance indicators) to help you meet your goals.
  3. Determine what to migrate and any issues or concerns. Consider what applications can be moved with little to no change, along with probable challenges for other elements. In this step, you’ll also need to decide on using a public, private, or hybrid cloud. Hybrid clouds are the preference, with 84 percent of respondents from the 2019 State of Cloud Report confirming this.
  4. Develop your data migration plan, detailing how each application will convert to the cloud. Identify ways to sustain data integrity and privacy in this step, as well as operational continuity and any dependencies.
  5. Select your cloud provider. As you’ve outlined your applications, challenges, plans, and dependencies, you should now have a clear picture of what you need in a cloud provider. There are multiple options available with varying costs and features.
  6. Execute the migration. Once you’ve confirmed the previous steps, it’s time to act. There are several phases of cloud migration. First, backup your data. Next is the cloud setup with provisions, connections, and testing. Then comes the data migration, which can be lengthy. The final step is testing and adjusting to ensure that everything is working as expected.

Why migrate?

Cloud migration can drive results and possibilities for your business. Such a change offers you these benefits:

  • Easy scalability to facilitate growth
  • Advancing operational efficiency, allowing you to modernize and interconnect
  • Improved data security — clouds have multiple layers of protection, unlike on-premise solutions
  • Faster deployments and implementations
  • Better collaboration among employees
  • Minimization of infrastructure complexity

Ready to learn more about migrating?

If you have questions about cloud migration, our experts are here to help. Contact us today.