Best Practices for Migrating from On-Prem to Cloud

For organizations looking to transform digitally, embracing the cloud is probably the best first step. As companies discover the umpteen benefits of migrating to the cloud, a paradigm shift is happening in the way businesses operate and provide services. However, migrating to the cloud takes more than just a robust strategy. Several aspects need to be accounted for to ensure maximum ROI and minimum disruption.

Why should enterprise organizations move to the cloud?

The cloud extends the functionalities and capabilities of existing on-premise environments into a virtualized infrastructure – thus offering flexibility and scalability like no other technology.

Migrating to the cloud helps businesses:

• Optimize operational costs: Move from a Capex to an Op-ex operating model by avoiding upfront investments in physical infrastructure, storage equipment, networks, electricity, and space.

• Improve user productivity: Provide anytime, anywhere access to critical compute and storage resources – including networks, servers, applications, and services.

• Drive scalability: Pay only for the resources (or services) used and scale business up or down – as needed.

Best practices to follow

While there is no denying the fact that cloud migration can be tremendously beneficial, a one-size-fits-all strategy might do more harm than good. Challenges around charting out a roadmap, finding the right vendor, and migrating critical legacy systems can come in the way of achieving success. The best way to ensure successful migration is by embracing some best practices:

Do a thorough assessment: Start by evaluating your current enterprise systems, legacy applications, lease, and support agreements, and license renewal dates. Move on to identifying critical workloads, service levels, and security and compliance requirements. Post assessment, you will be in a better position to understand what tools and practices would work best for your business scenario.
Involve key stakeholders: When it comes to cloud migration, having your C-suite understand the need and importance of migrating to the cloud is extremely important – not just to make the transition easy but also to pave the way for executive sponsorship. In addition to core IT resources, make sure you have the support of the department heads of all units, as well as business users for seamless and widespread adoption.
Explore various cloud options: Organizations looking to move to the cloud are often split for choice. Are you looking to move only a handful of critical workloads for improved security? Embrace a private cloud offering. Do you want to move all of your workloads for increased availability – think more towards a public cloud offering. Do you want the best of both worlds? Go hybrid!
Plan your strategy: When planning your strategy, there’s so much you can choose from: embrace the ‘lift and shift’ to migrate workloads into the cloud – with little or no modification. If you think your applications and workloads need to be tweaked before they are moved to the cloud, you could choose the ‘optimize and shift’ option. And if you think you need a fresh start, you could build your entire infrastructure from scratch. Although this option is expensive, it can help you ensure your environment is cloud-ready so that you can glean the best results from the cloud.
Review various aspects: Once you’ve chosen the cloud of your choice and charted out a robust strategy, it’s time to review other aspects of the cloud. These include ensuring the right level of security and compliance measures, the capability of the cloud solution to enable customization, and the various monitoring and backup options supported.
Assess costs and payment options: Cloud migration costs can often be tricky and requires you to be completely aware of all the direct and indirect costs. Make sure to factor in license costs, operational costs, costs of resources that will aid in the migration, as well as post-implementation support, monitoring, and training costs.

There are many choices for migrating to the cloud. Never be pressured into moving all of your workloads into a single cloud. Choose a combination of cloud options that best fits the needs of your business. Compare features of the various options available, look into models such as IaaS, PaaS, SaaS, or XaaS, and choose a model that helps you drive transformation with ease.

Managed Hosting with Codefactori

Addteq’s hosted and managed cloud environment Codefactori is centered around popular DevOps tools, including the Atlassian toolset. When combined with Addteq’s DevOps services, you can get critical insights and techniques on how to optimize your release process. With Codefactori, you can efficiently manage cost, scale seamlessly, and enjoy enterprise-grade security and 24×7 monitoring, all with 99.95% uptime.

A managed hosting solution like Codefactori can help you save a lot of money. Since Codefactori is fully managed and hosted, you can eliminate capital expenses across hardware, data centers, and payroll and ensure every aspect of cloud operation is taken care of – including periodic maintenance and upgrades.

Carry out thorough testing: Once you’re ready to migrate your workloads, ensure you’ve adequately backed up and merged data and addressed all migration issues. Conducting comprehensive tests before you go live will help you get insight into challenges and plan for workarounds – for maximum returns.
Take the help of experts in planning the migration: Affiliating with an expert cloud implementation partner like Addteq can help you leverage the expertise and capabilities of an experienced partner. A partner can offer timely advice and guidance when needed, help you choose the right cloud model, carry out due diligence, and ensure your workloads are up and running – 24×7.
Finally, train the team for new features: No cloud migration can be successful without the support and backing of your users. End-user training is an indispensable aspect of any cloud migration; so, make sure your users are adequately trained on how to use the cloud and how to make the most of the benefits it offers – to improve productivity and efficiency.

Cloud migration isn’t just about blindly moving data or applications to the cloud. It’s about carrying out a thorough assessment of existing workloads and processes, involving key stakeholders, and exploring various cloud options. It’s about planning your strategy, reviewing security, compliance and support aspects, backing up data, and training users on new and improved features. And this can all be done, but only if you have an experienced partner on board who can take you on the path to success.