- Develop a strategy
Before venturing into the journey to the cloud, you must establish a plan of action clearly stating how and what you want to achieve. Capture the baseline metrics of the company’s IT infrastructure to enable you to map workloads to your assets and applications. Having this understanding of where your organization stands will help you establish cloud migration key performance indicators (KPIs) like load times, response times, availability, CPU usage, memory usage and rates of conversion. A strategy should be developed early to prioritize the company’s objectives regarding technology. As such, these metrics will enable measurement across various categories.
- Identify the right applications
While there can be many apps, not all are cloud friendly. Some might work better in a private or public cloud, and others can be excellent when deployed to the hybrid cloud. As such, you must find out the differences in these apps and perform tweaks for those that may need little adjustments to work as intended. To identify these apps, a full analysis of the architecture, complexity, and implementation should be done before migration rather than after because it is easier when done at that time. During the evaluation of the apps that should be moved, consider those that should be moved as they are, the ones that require redesign, the levels of redesign necessary, the potential return on investment for each app and the deemed cost-effectiveness and security of the cloud will provide.
- Secure the right cloud provider
One of the critical components in optimizing the cloud is selecting a cloud provider that will offer the necessary guide during the migration and transition process. As such, you need to find the tools that will help you make the transition easier and the level of expertise needed, whether it can support private, public or multi-cloud environments. You also need to understand how the environment will help you deal with interdependencies, inflexibility and the support it can provide. While it may sound simple, moving to the cloud can be complex. Therefore, the cloud service provider you select should have proven experience.
- Ensure data integrity
Managing risks is crucial because it ensures that sensitive data cannot be exposed during migration. As an organization, you need to carry out pre-migration and post-migration validation to ensure that the automated controls are producing the desired outcomes and that operations within the company are not disrupted during the migration process. Post-migration validation ensures automated controls produce the necessary outcomes with minimal business disruptions.
- Think about encryption
In the era of massive security challenges, service providers should have a way of addressing all aspects of migration. This may include encrypting data to enhance security and thinking of a framework to manage complex transactions consistently. Ensure that security and encryption arrangements are spelt out clearly in service level agreements (SLA).