- Is cloud migration the right solution for you?
To ensure that the choice of migrating to the cloud is the right one, you need to first look at different options or factors that come with making a decision to move to the cloud and whether business expectations will be made. Look at your available resources, and have a clear understanding of your operations, capacity, and size that your business requires. Look at every single piece of hardware and application that you have so that you can successfully determine whether the cloud can store and process crucial data. Also, look into the applications that are ready to migrate to the cloud.
- Public, private or hybrid cloud
When migrating to the cloud, there are three main cloud environments to choose from. You can choose from public, private or hybrid models. The public cloud is the least expensive way that allows you to get scalability and availability offered by the cloud. However, the problem is that you will share resources with other cloud users. Furthermore, the security responsibility is shared between you and the cloud provider while the provider will be responsible for the underlying hardware.
A private cloud is another model you can consider. Under this arrangement, the hardware resources are dedicated to your organization alone. However, this comes with cost implications. The good thing is that you will benefit from scalability and availability. You will also isolate your data from other cloud customers.
A hybrid cloud is a mix of private and public clouds. Clients often choose this when they want to keep sensitive components on-premise or when they want to leverage the existing server assets while still having some utility.
- Cloud platforms
Most companies are faced with overwhelming options for cloud technology and service providers. It becomes even more confusing when CIOs fail to stick to a single provider but instead choose more than one cloud provider for a business. For your business, you can choose between the available, tried and tested cloud providers such as Amazon, Microsoft and Google among others.
- Cloud management team
As you migrate to the cloud, you need to find out if there is a specialized cloud team to migrate and ensure that your cloud plan is executed well from start to finish. You should be in a position to contact this team directly if you come across any problem or concern. This is the team that will monitor your application as they get integrated into the cloud. The team will also fix any functionality issues and collect data and feedback from users.
- Consider security and new challenges
When migrating to the cloud, mostly in the hybrid model, new security challenges emerge. Therefore, as you start this journey, you need to check all the security problems and the current solutions. New security challenges need new solutions to secure, detect and prevent security breaches in the cloud. When done properly, you can know the challenges and address them accordingly.