Migrating to the cloud can be an incredible investment for companies looking to optimize performance, improve efficiencies, and provide better customer experiences. Cloud migration can be a daunting task, and a successful migration takes careful planning and preparation. Just up and moving data without a strategy can cause technical, financial, and productivity issues. You need to understand your current systems and how moving to the cloud changes your organization and business models. These tips and tricks are here to help you make the migration process easy and efficient.
Select a Migration Strategy
Before you move to a cloud solution, you want to evaluate your current infrastructure to understand how migration impacts it. You want to determine how applications and data are stored and accessed and the system requirements. Determine the workloads and processes you want to be migrated to the cloud.
Select a migration strategy based on your evaluation and the best approach for your business. The six Rs of cloud migration are:
- Rehost – Also called a lift and shift, moves existing data and applications to the cloud as an exact copy. It’s the quickest and most cost-effective approach.
- Replatform – This is a variation of the rehost or lift and shift where you don’t change the core structure of the applications but make minor cloud adjustments to optimize cloud infrastructure.
- Repurchase – With this approach, you move your applications and processes to a new Software as a Service (SaaS) platform.
- Refactoring – Reimagining applications with cloud-native capability to improve reliability and scalability for future use.
- Retire – With this approach, you would consider if the application is needed and leave it on the in-house server for more review before migration.
- Retain – Making the decision to delay the migration is a retaining strategy if the business needs to put the migration on hold.
Choose KPIs Tailored to Your Business
A successful cloud implementation relies on key performance indicators or KPIs to provide valuable data on how effective the migration to the cloud is. There may be issues throughout the migration that you want to keep an eye on to ensure the cloud migration is minimizing negative impacts. Some important KPIs include:
- Application Performance – Are the applications functioning as intended, or are there errors?
- User Experience – Determine the user experience by evaluating page load times, lag, and crashes.
- Infrastructure – How much CPU and memory is used and how the system performs.
Choose metrics and KPIs based on the individual goals of your business. Measuring the impact of the cloud solution requires you to select these KPIs early in the planning stages and measure them throughout the migration process. You want to understand if the migration has improved or degraded the experience and determine if it was a cost-effective solution to continue investing in.
Migrate and Monitor
Once you’ve made all of your preparations, begin migrations during lower traffic hours to reduce productivity stalls and impacts on user experiences. Once the selected strategy has been completed, monitor the efforts to ensure the migration was successful. Confirm that all data and applications were migrated successfully and security systems are in place.
Ready to Start Migrating to the Cloud?
If your business is ready to move forward in cloud adoption, contact us at WheelHouse IT. We work closely with your team to ensure you receive the best ROI with a tailored migration strategy to fit your needs and get you the best ROI. Call us at 954.474.2204.
