Everyone is talking about the cloud and businesses want to take advantage of its many benefits, but too many regret their decision because of a poorly created cloud migration strategy. There is no doubt that the cloud can help with business data storage, save money and time.
Data is the most valuable asset a business has, and it makes up the programs you use, information about your customers and products, and other sensitive information you don’t want to get out. We’ll examine five tips to help develop your migration strategy and make it as painless and error-free as possible.
1. Cloud Migration Strategy Rule 1: Why?
It’s important to understand why you are migrating to the cloud. What are you migrating? Are you migrating everything from data to programs or only a part of it? Just because you can transfer something to the cloud doesn’t mean you should.
Is the goal to save money? Is it to provide more powerful computing power? Do you want to make it easier for your employees to work from home? Your strategy needs to be designed around your business goals and objectives.
There is significant time and investment when migrating to the cloud, so make sure you know what you want ahead of time.
2. Don’t Migrate Everything at One Time
Unless you use cloud migration services, you’re flying blind when it comes to moving your data to the cloud. There are bound to be problems and issues in the beginning, so plan on moving things over a little at a time.
You should start with your non-essential data in case something disastrous happens. You don’t want customer information accidentally deleted because of improper cloud migration. By using stages, it allows you to make your mistakes early on, so you’re experts by the time you get to the vital data.
3. Be Prepared for A Learning Curve
When moving information and programs to the cloud, accessing, and using them won’t be the same as it once was. There will be new steps and procedures put into place and your employees should be trained in using the new cloud-based software.
There is going to be a learning curve, so make sure you have cloud back-up capability. It’s possible someone may accidentally delete something or reconfigure something by accident.
4. Cost vs. Benefit
There is a significant cost to run everything from the cloud and you should understand that before committing. You should run a proof of concept to validate the performance and see the total cost. You’ll understand how much storage you’ll need, how many VMs are needed, and bandwidth.
It’s important to do the proof of concept as close to your final production environment as possible.
5. Be Willing to Make Changes
If you’re using legacy systems and software, then they might not run well on the cloud. Instead of trying to work with your existing systems, try switching to something designed to work on the cloud. Trying to make a legacy system work well on the cloud could end up being cost-prohibitive and outweigh the benefits of being on the cloud.
Legacy systems could also create migration problems because they were never meant to be used like that.
Migrating to the Cloud is Worth It
Businesses want to know how to store data on the cloud, but don’t hurry the process. Develop a well thought out cloud migration strategy and it will be painless for your business.
If you want to learn more about migrating your information to the cloud, then explore our site.
