Cloud Migration
4 Obstacles & Solutions
In recent years, cloud computing has skyrocketed. The quantity of cloud providers and solutions has continuously risen.
The Growth of the Cloud
Despite businesses hurrying to migrate to the cloud at an unprecedented rate, it is wise to develop a migration strategy before starting this journey. Businesses should first concentrate on pinpointing any possible obstacles that could arise during the migration process.
By pinpointing any possible challenges in the migration process your team will be better equipped to deal with any challenges, making it a much less stressful transition for all. So, before a project like this can begin let professionals guide you preventatively through any possible challenges. Wading through these if they do come up, without prior consideration can make the process (just like any other) unnecessarily stressful.
Devising A Plan
Cloud Migration Strategy
Any tech professional worth their salt will know that you shouldn’t change a business’ technical infrastructure without having a strong strategy ready to follow, and moving to the cloud isn’t an exception. Planning your migration is a vital part of a smooth transition. When we talk about strategy, we don’t just mean selecting a cloud provider and we’re off. Realistically, businesses ought to consider everything from analysing costs to projected downtime, team training, migration completion timeline, and various other elements relevant to cloud migrations. It’s particularly important to map out a completion timeline because completing a cloud migration can be time-consuming depending on how much data is to be moved and how large the business is. The cloud migration strategy is part of your business strategy tied in with the other divisions of your organisation.
Segment Your Data
Your Cloud Migration In Different Stages
The worst decision you can make when it comes to cloud migration, after choosing the wrong experts to work with, is pushing everything onto the cloud prematurely. While you might want to transfer everything into the cloud, it doesn’t work like that. You need to understand why you are doing this and through this distinguish what data needs to be moved to the cloud first. As a general rule of thumb, if it’s unnecessary or insignificant, why keep it. This is a useful place to begin the migration process as your team may make a mistake that could lead to deleting, corrupting, or unsecured important data. Often proof of concepts takes place with smaller parts of data.
Compromising or losing data is not something that any business should risk. So, make sure when you segment your data to migrate it in stages to your space on the cloud you start with the least important data you have.
The Cost Of Cloud Migration
Embarking on a cloud migration process can be expensive, particularly if you don’t outline the potential financial impact before you start. Migrating to the cloud is an investment and in the long-term, it is more cost-effective than traditional data storage. However, short-term it can be an expensive journey. How expensive will it be? That depends on how much data you have to migrate. You should factor in more than the cost of the actual cloud solutions, you need to factor in other elements like training your team, the expense of replacing or rewriting data so that it’s compatible with your chosen cloud’s architecture. It’s important that migrating to the cloud actually sees financial benefits rather than just increased costs without any real advantages.
Questions Around Cloud Security
Security concerns are usually what keep businesses from moving to the cloud. Security concerns should be taken seriously and should be kept as a top priority especially when it comes to technical solutions and new technology. By using a cloud provider you are essentially renting space for your business’ data, trusting another company with it. However, we think that so long as you choose a demonstrably trustworthy cloud provider then your moving to the cloud is one of the best decisions you can make for your business. Check their security practices, including how your data will be stored, how the data will be encrypted, and what regulations they comply with.
Cloud Solutions
Training Your Team
Any business that looks to implement new technology needs to make sure that it’s entire team is in agreement with it’s adoption, especially those who will work closely with it. Take the time to walk your team through the new cloud solution, some people might take longer than others to fully understand the solution. So, ensure that you keep touching base with your team even after giving them an overview of how the cloud solution will work. With a strong foundation of understanding from the beginning, even if it’s just the basics, your team will adapt to the change much sooner and work more seamlessly with the new technology. So, ensure your team can still access the data and types of business insights and reporting they need from the beginning.