Prepare your Business for what’s next -Best Practices for successful cloud migrations

Moving to the cloud is indeed a big step and though has various benefits, the journey could be intimidating if you don’t follow the right guidelines. Whether it is just one workload that you are moving on the cloud or multiple, you should be very meticulous while proceeding with it. Building a well-planned cloud migration strategy is quite crucial, especially for those businesses that are looking for faster deployment and better outcomes along with data compliance. This is why we have come up with this short and succinct guide on cloud migration best practices. So, let’s go through these practices one by one.

1. Creating a Migration Strategy

Building an effective migration strategy is the most crucial part of your cloud journey. When you create a cloud migration strategy, you evaluate your business’s readiness for the transformation. This evaluation provides you with insights on the current business standing that in turn not only helps you in formalizing your business’s future state but also in gaining an initial sense of the architectural needs of the cloud.

Besides, during the evaluation process itself, you also need to think about rapid disaster recovery if any and so take potential business disruptions and vulnerabilities into account while creating the strategy. Your preparedness for such issues will help you in quicker disaster recovery. Moreover, this is how you can ensure that the security requirements are consistently met. In short, an in-place business continuity plan helps you in maintaining a smooth cloud migration.

2. License Management & Migration Cost

Multiple licenses are required in cloud migration & functioning as well that include application server licenses, operating system licenses, or third-party tool licenses if any. You may be moving the licenses or converting those to cloud-based licenses. Whatever may be the case, you need to validate that during the strategy-building phase itself.

As far as the cloud migration cost is concerned, you may choose between the pay-per-use model and the bring-your-own license model based on the service provider you would be taking cloud migration services from. Each model has its pros & cons and you should figure out those while building the migration strategy itself to avoid any substantial shift in the plan. Moreover, don’t forget to evaluate the migration tool cost as well.

3. Managing the Network

It is always good to design the complete cloud architecture before you instigate the migration process as well as the resources should be mapped to their corresponding areas or subnets.

If you want a seamless switchover or migration, you should map the resources to the same domain name sending precise communication to the stakeholders to evade any confusion.

4. Managing Technical Expertise

In our previous article on Migration as a Service or Managed IT Services (Link: “Migrate To Cloud On Your Terms – Access Your Data Anywhere”), we discussed in detail the challenges of switching to the cloud and how they can be resolved. We discussed how a lack of technical expertise can thwart your cloud success as with a huge variety of services cloud solutions are complex to be implemented, managed, and maintained. However, a team of cloud experts by your side can solve the issue.

But then, it could be substantially expensive in training and develop the skillset within your organization forget about the time investment it demands. Moreover, even the results are not guaranteed. This is why experts often recommend outsourcing your cloud solutions to Managed Service Providers as they not only have years of experience but also exposure to working for diverse clients which means a diverse cloud environment. They will have better troubleshooting skills than those who are freshly trained. Besides, building an in-house team of experts could be not only expensive but also a daunting task.

5. Automating the Repeated Items

You may come across recurring patterns while migrating multiple applications, it’s always advisable to automate them. It will not only trim down the migration time but also provide more reliability. Automation is among some of the real benefits of moving to the cloud.

Wrap Up

Though there are several best practices, these were the five most significant practices for avoiding the common pitfalls and achieving successful cloud migration. Besides, you should stick to your bottom line i.e. curbing operational costs & risks, reducing hardware costs, and of course staying agile.

There are innumerable cloud service providers in the world. However, if you are looking specifically for a UAE cloud service provider, still there are many. One of the best cloud migration companies in Dubai is Microsoft Azure. Moreover, if migrating to the cloud seem too technical to you and if you are seeking an expert’s assistance, you can outsource your cloud migration solutions to a Managed Service Provider. One of the most trusted partners of Microsoft Azure is LogicEra.