How to Prepare for Cloud Migration

5-Step Approach for a Successful Cloud Migration Strategy

Cloud Migration – First Step Toward Unlocking Success

More than 90% of organizations use the cloud. With the cloud, businesses pay for only the resources they need when they need them. This flexibility helps companies to save money and stay competitive. Additionally, cloud computing makes it easier for businesses to scale their operations and ensure they always have the resources to meet customer demand. It is also proven that Cloud Computing helps you efficiently process, store and manage data in a particular network. A survey by Deloitte showed that small and medium businesses that used cloud computing made 21% more profit and grew 26% faster.

Cloud migration moves data and applications from an organization’s internal servers to a public cloud service provider. The migration can include all or part of an organization’s computing infrastructure and can be used to improve efficiency, scalability, and security. While there is much positivity with the growth of Cloud-based business, many organizations face real-world challenges while migrating workloads to the cloud platform and re-engineering the applications.

Is Cloud Migration a Daunting Task?

Migrating to the cloud can be extremely daunting, particularly for businesses with lots of data and applications. Many factors are at play, such as cost, data security, and application compatibility. One of the biggest challenges is that businesses must move their entire infrastructure to the cloud. This includes all their data, applications, and users. In addition, companies need to ensure that the cloud platform they choose can support all their needs. The migration process can also be time-consuming and complex.
To make the migration process as smooth and efficient as possible, it’s essential to have a detailed plan in place and enlist the help of a professional cloud migration services provider. By planning your migration strategy and understanding your options, you can ensure your move to the cloud is successful.
In this blog post, we’ll outline a 5-step approach for migrating to the cloud and making the transition as smooth as possible. Let’s get started!

5 Steps for a Successful Cloud Migration

With multiple ways to approach a cloud migration, a list is essential to plan a successful migration. Fortunately, we’ve put together a list of five steps to help you prepare for successful cloud migration. These 5 steps will ensure that your transition to the Cloud will be smooth and seamless.

1. Define Your Objectives

Define your objectives before migrating to the Cloud. What are you hoping to accomplish by migrating to the Cloud? Are you looking to improve performance, reduce costs, or both? Once you know your objectives, you can develop a plan to help you achieve them. You can lower your Total Cost of Ownership (TCO) by 40% by migrating your business to the public Cloud. To get started answer the following questions:

• What are your business goals?
• What are your current pain points?
• What are your application and data dependencies?
• What is your budget?

Answering these questions will give you a good idea of which applications and data should take priority during your migration.

2. Assess Your Current Environment

The assessment phase is the most crucial in your cloud migration. You determine the dependencies and requirements to migrate your infrastructure to Cloud. You need to dive deep and gain knowledge about all the applications you want to migrate, their requirements, their dependencies, and your current environment. You must understand your starting point to plan and execute a Cloud migration successfully.
In this phase, perform the following steps:

• Build a complete inventory of your applications.
• Categorize your apps based on their dependencies and properties.
• Educate and train your teams about Cloud.
• Build an experiment and conduct a proof of concept on the Cloud.
• Calculate and analyze the total cost of ownership (TCO).

You can only develop an effective plan for migrating to the Cloud if you clearly understand your current environment. Once you have performed the above steps and have the information, you can start planning how best to migrate each element to the Cloud.

3. Select the Right Cloud Provider

The most crucial reason behind selecting the right cloud provider is trust. Your Cloud provider needs to be reliable and have a good track record. It would be best if you also ensured that their services could be customized and tailored to meet your needs.
Another important reason to select the right cloud provider is cost. Only 3 out of 10 organizations know exactly where their cloud costs are going. You need to find a provider who can offer you a reasonable price for the services you need and also scale with your business as it grows.
Finally, selecting the right cloud provider is vital because of the security implications. You need to ensure that your data is safe and secure and that your provider has a good security infrastructure. There are a variety of cloud providers to choose from, so it’s essential that you select one that meets your specific needs. Take the time to research and finalize a provider that offers the features and services you require.

4. Develop a Detailed Migration Plan

Once you’ve selected your cloud provider, it’s time to develop a detailed migration plan. Once you start to onboard the resources into your organization’s cloud, you don’t want to figure out, on the fly, how to connect them to the network, how to control the traffic between them, how to provide the essential services like a DNS, time service or backup. You want to be prepared beforehand.
Build a business case for every application you plan to migrate to the cloud, showing an expected total cost of ownership (TCO) on the Cloud compared to the current TCO. Using cloud cost calculators, estimate future cloud costs, including the amount and type of storage used, computing resources, considering operating systems, instance types, and specific performance and networking requirements.
A clear and concise migration strategy will help ensure your Cloud migration goes off without a hitch. Be sure to involve all relevant stakeholders in developing your plan, so everyone is on the same page. Without a well-thought-out plan, one can get lost in the details and lose oversight of the overall goal.

5. Test, Test, Test

Before migrating any applications or data, it’s critical that you test your migration plan thoroughly. It includes testing both functionalities (e.g., can users still log in?) and performance (e.g., is the website still loading quickly?) This will help ensure everything goes according to plan and minimize the risk of any unexpected issues or downtime during the migration process. Tests will ensure that the migration plans will work as expected and that the cloud provider can meet the organization’s needs.
Testing will also help identify any potential problems with the plan before the migration occurs. The test process is ongoing and has to be conducted after migration too. It’s essential to validate that all data was migrated successfully—you don’t want any surprises down the road!

Embark on the Cloud Migration Journey with MSys Technologies

MSys Technologies Cloud Migration services is focused on initiating a handshake of your legacy practices with modern and innovative business solutions. Our Cloud Engineering services plan and implement a phased, risk-averse cloud migration strategy. Our cloud migration practices modernize hardware and IT networks without hampering organizations’ data workflows. Our Cloud Engineers leverage the leading automation tools and follow policy-driven and precision-first policies. Our Cloud Migration services also allow organizations to extract the value of their legacy systems with the induction of scalability, efficiency, and high performance.
Our intelligence-optimized and tool-specific framework ensures automated migration of your network servers, CRM, ERP systems, web applications, and databases to the cloud ecosystem. Our Cloud Architects apply the Industrialized – as –a – Service method to ensure streamlined delivery of workloads from physical to cloud, data center to the cloud, cloud to virtual, virtual to cloud, or cloud to cloud.
Migrating to the cloud doesn’t have to be complicated or stressful. Careful planning and execution can be a smooth process that results in significant cost savings and improved efficiency. To fully realize the benefits of cloud computing, you must continuously monitor things post-migration and ensure that everything is running smoothly (and making necessary adjustments along the way). MSys has the experience and expertise to successfully help your business migrate to the cloud.
Connect with us NOW to get started on your Cloud Migration journey!