Top 10 Things to Consider When Planning Your Cloud Migration

Many companies in recent years have considered migrating to the cloud for one reason or another.

The global pandemic of COVID-19 throughout 2020 and 2021 has significantly transformed the business landscape. Having remote workers on the team is now the norm for many companies, as is the use of different cloud tools and platforms, often across multiple offices.

While these changes can bring positive business improvements, they also potentially present new challenges, especially in ensuring seamless collaboration when using multiple disconnected solutions.

This is where migrating to the cloud can act as a potential solution, as moving workloads and resources to the cloud can bring several benefits to the organization, including but not limited to:

  • improved profitability
  • Smoother integration between different IT solutions
  • Improved efficiency and accountability
  • Improved communication and collaboration among team members.

Yet despite all those benefits, migrating to the cloud is easier said than done. Below, we’ll discuss the crucial things to consider when planning your cloud migration to ensure success.

Things to consider when planning your migration to the cloud

While there are numerous factors to consider before migrating your resources to the cloud (some are obvious, some may not be), here are some of the most important to consider:

1. Integration and dependencies

A very common mistake that many companies make when migrating their assets to the cloud is not paying enough attention to the dependencies between applications or resources. When companies identify dependencies too late in the migration process, it can lead to additional (and unplanned) downtime, errors, and limited cloud system functionality before these dependencies and integration issues are resolved.

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When planning your cloud migration process, it’s crucial to carefully assess the relationships between workloads and resources, so you can identify the proper sequence in which migration should occur.

2. Financial cost

While the goal of the cloud migration process is ultimately to improve your business efficiency (including financial efficiency), cloud migration will require up-front investments, which can be significant.

Not to mention, the financial cost of migrating to the cloud doesn’t stop once the migration is done, but you’ll also need to consider potential long-term costs, such as training employees for the new cloud environment.

Some of the most important costs to consider are:

  • Invest in people and solutions to facilitate a successful migration
  • Reconfigure and tune workloads/applications to fit the cloud environment
  • Training of users in the new systems.
  • bandwidth costs
  • Costs related to performance issues, including downtime and delays

Careful planning and financial risk management are crucial to ensure a successful cloud migration

3. Efficiency

Another very common mistake that many organizations make when migrating their assets to the cloud is overestimating or underestimating their resource needs.

Choosing the right cloud environment is important to find the right balance between resource availability and actual usage profile, so you can maximize the profitability and ROI of your cloud migration.

4. Data security

You will naturally be moving sensitive/regulated data during the cloud migration process, so preventing data leaks or loss should be an important consideration.

When planning your migration to the cloud, it is crucial to develop and implement comprehensive security policies, including implementing access control to the entire infrastructure to protect the security and integrity of your data.

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Additionally, choosing a cloud platform that offers pre-built security features (i.e. Google Cloud Platform) can also help.

5. Control and access mechanism

Evaluate how your users currently access your applications and resources in the old environment, and assess how access mechanisms may need to change in the new cloud environment.

To minimize resistance to adoption, it is important to consider how the expected user experience may be affected and prepare users accordingly to ensure ease of use.

6. Scalability and vendor lock-in

As a business, you should aspire to grow and scale, and when choosing a cloud platform provider, it’s also important to consider whether your solution will be able to scale with you.

When evaluating your cloud provider, also consider how easy it is to drop their services, or else you may get caught up in a situation we call “provider lock-in.” For example, a cloud solution may not meet your requirements, or it simply increased in price significantly. If you cannot easily migrate from the cloud service in such situations, it can have a negative impact on the performance and scalability of your business.

7. Licenses

Still related to scalability, assess whether your application is licensed per core, per VM (Virtual Machine), or for the entire environment. Different licensing models can significantly affect your total costs. For example, if an application is licensed on a per-core model while your cloud environment does not allow you to configure your per-core cloud environment, it can significantly increase the license cost.

8. Skills gap

Especially if you are migrating from a legacy environment to the cloud, you will need to prepare your team and update it with the necessary skills to ensure seamless adoption of the new cloud environment.

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However, acquiring new skills can be very challenging for some employees, and for some skill sets required in cloud operation, regular training alone may not be enough.

9. Application architecture

Careful architecture assessment of each application is crucial when planning cloud migration, not only to ensure compatibility, but also to ensure that you can optimize each application for the cloud environment.

Remember that one of the primary purposes of migrating to the cloud is to improve agility, so it is important to evaluate your application architecture to ensure it is efficient and agile.

10. Prioritization

To minimize downtime (and, if possible, ensure there is no downtime during and after the cloud migration process), careful prioritization is key.

It is important to identify which applications and workloads should be migrated first (also considering dependencies) and do so; you will also need careful identification of your business needs and priorities.

Ending

To ensure a smooth and optimal cloud migration process, you can take advantage of the help of Google Cloud Partner.

Pythian Cloud Migration Services will help ensure a safe and seamless migration to your target cloud environment, ultimately allowing your business to maximize the ROI of your cloud environment.

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Categories: Technology
Source: vtt.edu.vn

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