10 Best Practices to Build a Foolproof Cloud Migration
The complexity of moving to the cloud is one of the biggest barriers hindering the adoption of cloud computing at some organizations. However, as more businesses of all sizes take the plunge and benefit from the lower costs and flexibility of cloud computing, companies that keep a solely on-premise IT infrastructure are at a competitive disadvantage.
The challenges of cloud migration include keeping disruption to workloads to a minimum, ensuring watertight security and proper compliance with regulations, and choosing the most suitable setup.
Even though successfully moving some of your workloads to the cloud can be a daunting prospect, it doesn’t have to be impossible. This article provides you with ten best practices to increase your chances of a successful cloud migration.
1. Take a Company-Wide Approach
The only way to successfully migrate to the cloud is to take a company-wide approach. This means having discussions between and input from many of the relevant company stakeholders instead of passing the buck solely to IT.
Get everyone involved in migration initiatives, from developers to operations to business users. It’s true that the majority of the technical work will be carried out by IT, however, a successful cloud migration is a collaborative effort involving many teams and departments working together as a unit.
2. Know Your Service Models
There are three main cloud service models: hybrid, public, and private. It is imperative not to go ahead with your cloud migration until you fully understand the benefits and disadvantages of each model.
The public cloud is the easiest service model to start out with. Public cloud services provide multiple organizations with access to computing resources such as data storage, applications, and databases via an Internet connection.
A private cloud provides access to computing resources for a single organization over private IT infrastructure, whether that’s an internal network or a private network connection. This is a more complex service model to set up but it has the benefit of better performance and more privacy.
A hybrid service model combines the above models into one cloud implementation, with a connection required between the two different types of cloud. A hybrid cloud provides more benefits and greater flexibility but it is more complicated to set up.
3. Consider Key Business Factors
With knowledge of your service model options in mind, the type of implementation you choose then depends on key business factors. The degree of your existing IT investment is hugely important—it is going to be complex and costly to abandon a large pre-existing investment in on-premise IT.
Other factors to consider include migration costs, the costs of using your chosen cloud services, data security, and any industry regulations that govern where particular information can be stored.
4. Implement Proper Role-based Access
Most cloud services enable enterprises to set up their own form of cloud access management, giving control over who can access which files, applications, and resources. Make sure your organization enforces proper role-based access before you go live with using your chosen cloud services.
Major cloud security issues often arise because employees are given access levels that are beyond what they need to perform their jobs. With a new system like a cloud service, people are arguably more likely to make security blunders. Which leads on to…
5. Train Employees Before You Go Live
There is likely to be chaos if employees aren’t given some form of training on how to use your chosen cloud services before you migrate. People might not know how or where to access their files, and you end up losing several business days of productivity.
Make sure you take a half-day or full day to train employees in advance of migration. Don’t inundate people with pages upon pages of complex language. Teach people the basis, perhaps with the aid of screenshots, slideshows, or even videos.
6. Start with the Simplest Use Case
It is advisable not to go “all-in” with cloud migration and attempt to do everything in one go. Even if it is your plan to move solely to the cloud, it is prudent to start out with migrating a simple business use case, such as using the cloud for data backup or migrating a small application.
The experience gleaned from successfully migrating even just a minor use case can provide valuable insight and confidence for an eventual larger migration
7. Have Backups in Place
A mistake organizations often make is that they depend solely on the reliability of their chosen public cloud service. For example, you might use the Microsoft Azure service for storing data. But what happens if there is an Azure outage? What happens if something goes wrong after migrating? You can’t access your data.
There are Azure backup solutions available, along with similar services that backup your cloud data from the systems of other public cloud providers. These cloud backup services provide you with additional peace of mind in the event that your cloud provider experiences an outage or someone makes a mistake during migration and deletes your data.
8. Automate Where Possible
When migrating to the cloud in phases, you are likely to come across repeated patterns and tasks that can be automated. Automation saves crucial time, reduces risk, and lowers the costs of migration.
There are various tools available from the likes of IBM and Accenture that help to automate the migration of applications and data to the cloud. There are also scripts that can automate tedious and repetitive tasks like altering database versions.
9. Monitor the Migration
It’s prudent to monitor the actual migration process to ensure everything is working as it should. It might be the case that an application behaves in an unexpected way upon going live in the cloud. Make sure you collect all relevant logs and examine them.
Furthermore, make sure you monitor the actual resource consumption using the available cloud tools, which often come in the form of a dashboard in service like Azure, AWS, etc. When mapping out a migration strategy, you will have budgeted for a certain cloud cost based on anticipated resource consumption.
Make sure you check that the actual resource utilization is in line with what you anticipated, and if not, make alterations such as right-sizing servers and switching off resources that aren’t being used.
10. Avail of Support
Many cloud providers, both public and private, include some level of support with their services, either by default or as an additional paid option. If you encounter any issues during migration, make sure to get help. Cloud support staff are knowledgable about their services to the point that they can help you resolve problems much quicker than you would alone.
Conclusion
These best practices will help to uncomplicate many of the more difficult aspects of cloud migration. Make sure you incorporate them into your migration strategy.
