What are the Best Practices for Seamless Migration to the Cloud?

The expenditure on public cloud services in the last 2018 was around $160 Billion according to the International Data Corporation.

The global cloud market is expected to go over $650 Billion by the end of the year 2025. According to the statistics of 2020, 70% of the total expenditure on technical was covered by the cloud. As most of the organizations are going serverless, this is the market of the cloud has been extended so widely that now almost 84% of the enterprises opt for a multi-cloud strategy. Cloud adoption has become the priority of most of the IT infrastructures and is expected to maintain its popularity in the market for many years to come.

A question might arise in the minds of the readers that what is so miraculous and demanding in cloud computing services?

Using and running software seamlessly without even installing it is the beauty of cloud computing. Even the installed software cannot bring the level of redundancy, stability, and security that cloud computing software brings in the infrastructure.

Also, if you want to know more about how your data is stored in the cloud, make sure to check what is cloud storage guide. The other beauty that cannot go unmentioned is the flexibility that cloud services bring on board by allowing any kind of enterprise and of any size. There are many enterprises that are not able to afford or do not have that technical expertise to support extended resources. For them managed cloud services come at the rescue as an excellent solution. The plethora of content and other means that cloud hosting providers is impossible to even imagine with any other platform. Different types of cloud services i.e. IaaS, PaaS, and SaaS have been contributing and capturing the market at different levels. These services contribute the most in the quarterly revenues of all the software vendors. 

If you have already realized the importance of cloud for your business, but if you haven’t then cloud migration should be the next footstep to give that required edge to your business. A single software migration takes account into many factors but the benefits involved make the procedure unquestionable. There might be some risks involved also when your infrastructure is not designed to withstand the cloud module. Now the question arises whether it is worth taking the risk? The answer is a hundred times YES.  

Do companies need to know about the technical specifications of cloud migration? Yes, because then the company would be operated in the hands of the own dedicated cloud service or any external cloud service provider for so many years to come. So without wasting any further time let’s get into the requirements before, in and after cloud migration in detail.

Pre-requisites of migration

1. Future prospect of the business- Before migrating to the cloud, the company should definitely foresee all the future prospects of the business with the help of the researchers and analyzers. The envision of future needs will only be the deciding factor whether your business requires cloud migration or not. Hence a strategy must be prepared and each concerned person must be fully aware of the circumstances and results. To come up to the best decision, the company should go through the pros and cons of cloud migration and get proper feedback from already cloud migrated enterprises for better understanding. 
2. Outlining the cloud model - Once the business gets migrated to the cloud, roles and responsibilities change for many team members of the organization. Hence, each member must be properly informed about the changes in the infrastructure. In this way, the duties are separated and business activities are ensured. It also involves identifying and understanding the workloads and what are their supporting systems. The best way of doing this is by discovering elements like application to application, application to VM and VM to physical machine dependencies. After this has been done, deciding for the number of accounts a company will have or should be given grant access to. 
3. Training the staff - Migrating to the cloud is not the end solution making your staff adaptable to the cloud environment is also a sole responsibility for any company. Once the whole staff gets that required technical expertise, things become more smooth and at a fast pace. But this should happen at a very early stage as any delay in this may lead to disruptions at the organizational level. 
4. Capturing current and targets by KPIs- Capturing current performance and what can be the future capabilities. Though this might require coordination with different stakeholders and other issues involved. In spite of these issues, understanding the current performance baselines should be the immediate action for any enterprise which is going for cloud migration. In the middle of this not forgetting about the targets that you would have dreamt of for your company should not be ignored. Setting the KPIs (Key Performance Indicators) would be the approach to this. The staff that has expertise in the domain should look out whether the targets are aligned with the new cloud environment and if not then what changes are required.
5. Selecting the best cloud service provider- Once you have gone through all the prerequisites, the major step comes of selecting the best and most suitable cloud service provider for your business. There is no harm in trying out multiple options before deciding for that one. 

Steps during migration

1. Automation- Any cloud platforms’ dexterity can be tested through automation. Try to automate most of the operations and if possible all. To achieve the highest level of automation, the structure of the organization should be consistent and transparent and this might demand a stretched time.
2. Transform the internal processes- To enjoy the maximum efficiency of any cloud service it is very important that the conventional internal processes must be transformed accordingly. More the number of processes will be transformed and aligned to the cloud platform; more empowered will be your business. All the BI applications must be migrated along with the custom reporting tools and data applications.

Post migration 

1. Monitoring is mandatory- Even after the migration has been successfully done, the system requires 24/7 monitoring to ensure whether all the processes are in line with the architecture. Even a single ignorance within the infrastructure can lead to future losses. 
2. Ensure cloud-native monitoring tools- Although there are multiple tools available, an expert like cloud needs the best cloud-native monitoring tool so as to find the bestway to fit into the business.
3. Keep the single point of contact- If you have purchased the cloud-based service from a reputed cloud service provider, and then it would be for the best that a single point of contact should be kept with the support centre of your cloud service provider.

All these steps performed at the right time during cloud migration can literally bring miracles in your business. Cloud migration must be carried out in accordance with the best practices. But apart from all this, the onus lies on you to keep a track of the records and results, benchmarks to be set and what would be the deviations. All this together will ensure a successful cloud migration and your company reaching the optimum level of ROI.

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