Migrating to Cloud offers various benefits to enterprises like efficiency, economy and scalability that allows them to perform business functions quickly and efficiently. As Cloud computing services are available to everyone regardless of their size and type, businesses are increasingly attracted to adopt it to streamline their business processes and become more competitive. However, migrating your application to the cloud is a huge step which involves transformation at various levels. The larger the business, the more complex migration may be, and CIOs should evaluate carefully before commencing on their cloud journey.
Here’s what you should consider before migrating to Cloud
As a decision-maker, here is a checklist that must be carefully considered while choosing the best way to migrating to cloud.
Business Goals
The first consideration for any major decision is the business goals that would be achieved by it. Same is the case with cloud migration. CIOs should consider how the company will stand to benefit with the migration. A careful risk-benefit analysis will allow you to comprehend the business purpose of moving to cloud and how it aligns with your overall strategic direction. A related concern is whether the technologies enabled by cloud are compatible with legacy applications and systems already being used in the organization and what kind of business disruption such a transition would involve.
Security
This is one of the most important concerns for any CIO. Although public cloud providers have stringent security frameworks in place and use best practices to secure data on their cloud, it can be daunting to shift your valuable data on another company’s servers. Experts argue that your data is most secure in the cloud, because cloud providers can safeguard data more effectively than most enterprises. However, it would be prudent to ensure that your cloud service provider has adequate security measures in place.
Compliance
Related to security, compliance is yet another important consideration for most enterprises. Depending on the regulations of your company and/or country, you might need to store certain data in a specific region, or some data may not be deployed to the cloud at all. If you choose to migrate to cloud, there are ways to mitigate security and compliance risks and you should discuss the same with your cloud provider or cloud partner.
Business Continuity and Disaster Recovery
To ensure business continuity, you should contemplate your disaster recovery strategy before embarking on your cloud migration. What would be an effective backup strategy if your cloud provider experiences a downtime or is faced with a disaster? What is the recovery plan to get you out of the crisis? It is important that you have some knowledge of what constitutes an outage and when fiscal penalties should take effect in such a case. Your service-level agreements (SLAs) should cover all these specifics.
Cost and ROI
One of the critical considerations around moving to cloud vs on-premise is the cost of running infrastructure – hardware, software, human resources, fault tolerance and disaster recovery. One of the advantages of migrating to cloud services is that cloud technology is paid as an operating expenditure (OPEX) and requires little or no more flexibility and scalability. In terms of running costs, your cloud subscription should cover most of your costs.
Verification and Support
In most cases, internal IT departments don’t possess the skills to effectively monitor and maintain a cloud environment. Enterprises also need the support of an independent party to assess and verify the cloud environment being suggested by the cloud provider. Cloud Managed Service Providers (MSPs) possess extensive cloud knowledge to validate, migrate and support your environment. It is also advisable to use an autonomous Cloud Management Platform (CMP), like Arcus, to manage and optimize your cloud assets. This will allow you to keep a view about the costs incurred, identify usage patterns and adjust your infrastructure to get the most optimal cloud performance.
Summary
Migrating to cloud is not a one-off decision. It has long-term and company-wide implications and therefore, the decision to move to cloud should not be made in isolation. You should talk to a cloud partner to assess your current infrastructure and provide a comprehensive migration roadmap along with the risks involved. If you carefully consider the above 6 factors on Migrating to cloud, you are more likely to make a sound choice.
