5 Important Considerations for Cloud Migration

At this point, 94% of enterprises are using cloud services. Adoption accelerated during the pandemic, with a staggering 61% migrating to the cloud in 2020 alone. It’s clear that cloud adoption isn’t going anywhere, and businesses are homing in on its capabilities not only to drive remote work, but also improve operations, cut costs, and encrypt data.
Some businesses already have a plan to migrate to the cloud, others are doing discovery and budgeting to find out if they can afford the migration they envision, and others are looking for advice on how to better align a hybrid mix of applications. Wherever you may be on your cloud journey, it’s important to approach the project thoughtfully. Here are five important considerations for cloud migration.
Why are you moving to the cloud in the first place? How will this transition better support your business?
Just as you scoped business requirements when you purchased your software (I hope!), you must similarly scope business requirements for the cloud migration. Doing this builds clear goals that can be aligned to strategies for how you approach cloud adoption.
The cloud isn’t one singular option, it can be implemented via public cloud, private cloud, multi-cloud, and hybrid cloud strategies. The one you choose depends on how much control you want over your data, the type of security features you require, how big or small your organization is, the budget you’re working with, etc. Here’s a little more detail on each of the options:
Public Cloud: Most people automatically envision the public cloud when thinking about cloud environments. A public cloud is essentially the internet, with a shared infrastructure that’s usually offered through a cloud service provider (CSP) like AWS. The CSP stores the data, runs the applications, provides development services, and more. Public clouds are cost efficient but can be limited in flexibility and security options.
Private Cloud: Private clouds are more easily customized than public clouds, but that also means they’re pricier. Only about 15% of enterprises opt for private clouds. These enterprises tend to be in industries with stricter regulatory or industry compliance standards. A private cloud is not shared with anyone else. It’s built in a private cloud environment with enhanced security features. However, the responsibility for managing the private environment falls on the organization itself, which requires additional resources and added costs.
Hybrid Cloud: Hybrid clouds are pretty much what they sound like – a mix between public and private cloud environments. Hybrid clouds help create a solution that has more dynamic usability for security, cost efficiency, and scalability, which is probably why 82% of large enterprises use them. With a hybrid cloud, businesses can take advantage of on-demand aspects of the public cloud while enjoying the control of a private cloud. However, the application mix of a hybrid cloud can lead to complex integrations that can sometimes become more costly over time.
Multi-Cloud: Amazingly, 92% of organizations currently have a multi-cloud strategy in place or are planning to get one. Companies using multi-cloud are using more than one public cloud service or setup at a time. This type of deployment can leverage different IaaS (Infrastructure-as-a-Service), PaaS (Platform-as-a-Service), and SaaS (Software-as-a-Service) vendors and is usually implemented by larger enterprises with many moving parts who are looking to establish redundancy and a reliable system backup.
There are different approaches that organizations can use to migrate to the cloud. There’s the lift-and-shift approach, the refactoring approach, replatforming, rebuilding, and replacing. It’s good to be familiar with each one as you consider which may be best for your budget and operating needs.
Budget is a powerful driver when migrating to the cloud. It’s everyone’s job to try and stay within that budget to maximize the ROI of the project for the business. Obvious costs include things like the cost of adopting new platforms, migrating data, hiring developers, etc. Most of the major CSPs offer a price calculator that can help, but there may be a few cost calculations that are less obvious. Here are some questions you should know the answer to before you settle on your cloud migration budget:
Does your organization follow HIPAA, GDPR, FERPA, etc.? Do you have strict data privacy standards, such as those in the financial services industry? The right type of cloud environment and the right cloud migration approach are linked to these standards. You’ll need to consider data classification and protection regulations to determine which systems and data can be migrated.
Your team also should analyze the potential CSPs to understand their security standards, data ownership, shared responsibilities, and other data security factors. Once you’ve chosen a route for your cloud data migration, you must think bigger picture on how the move to the cloud will impact your existing risk management, disaster recovery, and data governance standards. Managing security and compliance in the cloud will require updates to these processes and should not be overlooked.
Even if you do a lift-and-shift cloud migration, the pre-cloud assessment, planning, and preparations still take time. The more extensive the cloud project you’re trying to undertake, the longer your project timeline will become. Along with that comes effects on staff and customers. Will these changes come with new training for your internal teams? How will the affects on day-to-day operations impact your customers in the meantime?
It’s important to consider how different departments will be affected during each phase of your project. Keeping everyone looped into what’s happening will help ease the transition, but you still need a larger plan for communicating the changes, training teams, and updating customer-facing processes to match the new cloud capabilities.
Your CIO should help outline a timeline with your CSPs that notes the major benchmarks of the project and when they should be accomplished. This way, you can clearly see the progress towards your end goals and the accomplishments in each stage of the cloud migration project. It’s also important to set expectations for downtime and worst-case scenarios so you have an action plan in the event that they occur.
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