The cloud has revolutionised business IT, creating flexibility and affordability for companies to establish systems and perform complex tasks that once were only available to the most biggest organisations with the most resources.
However, something of a paradox exists at the heart of cloud migration. While the promise of the cloud is simplicity and scalability, the huge variety of options and providers on offer can result in complexity and costliness, with businesses ending up paying for more than they need across multiple vendors.
To realise the true benefits of the cloud, it’s important to create a clear roadmap to plan your cloud migration.
Key questions
To develop a roadmap that will ensure that your cloud migration will deliver what you need from it without costing you the Earth, there are some key questions that you need to ask yourself.
The first is the ‘why’. Understanding what you want to achieve from your migration is key to developing a plan. Perhaps you’ve outgrown your existing hardware or it is on the verge of becoming obsolete. You might want to cut costs, or build scalability or flexibility into your operations. Knowing what your goal is is vital for assessing the success of your migration, and will underpin your entire plan.
The ‘why’ is naturally followed by the ‘how’. Who will be the team responsible for the migration? This might be handled in-house by your IT team, or you might want to bring in outside specialists to help or take charge. Whatever the case, it’s essential that everyone is working together and knows what their place is in the plan.
Creating a roadmap for successful cloud migration
The questions to ask yourself when planning your migration
This is also the stage where you need to prepare your existing infrastructure for the migration. Are you planning a hybrid environment? Can you foresee any compatibility issues, and what can you do to mitigate these? The better prepared you are, the more likely you are to avoid the biggest bumps in the road.
Finally, you need to get the timing right. The timeframe will be dictated by various factors, such as the amount and type of data to be migrated to the cloud and when the timing will be best for your business operations. Migrations can be done quite quickly or over an extended period of time, and it will be up to you and your migration team to decide what is best for your company.
Next steps
When your roadmap is ready, it’s time to put it into action. You are likely to encounter issues and roadblocks (whether large or small) during your migration and it’s important to not let them derail you from following your roadmap. Knowing the kinds of issues you are likely to face will help you to prepare for them and know what to do if they arise.
And once the migration is ‘complete’, that isn’t the end of the story. You are likely to have other tasks and goals ahead of you. After all, the beauty of the cloud is in its flexibility and scalability, so it will serve you to take a long-term perspective on your migration and the future management of your infrastructure.
To learn more about creating and executing your roadmap and what comes after, read our co-branded IT Pro/ANS report, ‘Future-proofing transformation: An end-to-end roadmap for SMB cloud migration’
