Implement Cloud Migration – The cloud plays a dominant role in today’s digital business landscape. Enterprises are increasingly embracing cloud-first strategies to enable agile application development, facilitate continuous innovation, and gain flexibility in their operations to better meet evolving business needs as well as growing customer expectations. A cloud-first approach utilizes the public or private cloud rather than relying on traditional IT infrastructure to improve collaboration among teams within the organization, boost productivity, scale and centralize applications, and deliver robust and personalized customer experiences.
The cloud’s advantages are moving beyond the primary functions of data hosting and cost savings. In today’s digital era, enterprises are continually disrupting and leveraging cloud technology in exceptional ways—be it to accelerate the benefits of advanced big data analytics or to enable, at scale, AI-powered smart intelligence.
“83% of enterprises will move their workloads to the cloud by 2020”
There is a strong correlation between the cloud and Digital Transformation (DX). In order to progress in the digital transformation journey, enterprises must leverage disruptive technologies such as artificial intelligence (AI), Internet-of-Things (IoT), big data analytics, augmented or virtual reality (AR/VR), and Machine Learning. However, these technologies need heavy computing power, speedy data, ample storage, and a robust infrastructure. Cloud technology delivers on these requirements quickly with no upfront huge investment, thereby facilitating digital transformation of the enterprise. According to LogicMonitor’s Cloud Vision 2020 Report, 83% of enterprise workloads will be In the Cloud By 2020.
IDG recently conducted a survey to understand the state of digital transformation in companies belonging to various industries—including high tech, financial services, manufacturing, retail, and healthcare. All 628 respondents of the survey were part of an organization that is planning to adopt or has already adopted a digital-first business approach. The survey revealed that Private Cloud (53%) and Public Cloud (45%) are among the top five digital technologies that are already being leveraged by companies to accelerate digital transformation.
“The Worldwide Public Cloud Services Market is projected to grow by 17.3 % in 2019 to total $206.2B, up from $175.8B in 2018 according to Gartner”
Successfully Implement Cloud Migration Project
Moving to the cloud is one of the best business decisions that enterprises can make as they prepare to take their applications and services to the next level. However, to make the most of the cloud and the myriad benefits the technology can afford, companies must go about the cloud migration implementation with proper planning, execution, and testing. Below are the 3 key steps required to make a successful transition to the cloud.
1. Strategy Assessment and Roadmap Planning to Implement Cloud Migration
Before you implement cloud migration project, you must first assess its readiness. The assessment should look at the following
- Why cloud migration is required and what are the business impacts?
- Security and Compliance requirements to implement cloud migration if any
- Employee Training and Business Process changes
- Type of Cloud (Private vs Public)
- Type of Migration (Lift & Shift vs Rearchitect/Refactor)
- Cost of Migration
- Migration Strategy
An organization should next document and gather information about all its applications in terms of role, criticality level, and level of infrastructure automation and identify the workloads that can be easily migrated without the need to refactor or re-platform.
A critical success factor in the process is that a company must put together a dedicated team with a competent leader to facilitate the migration process. Ideally, this team documents the complete migration strategy into a runbook, which details all the procedures in the cloud migration plan.
2. Migrating to the Cloud
The success of the migration depends on the migration strategy and the planning that has gone into putting together the runbook which details the migration process. Thorough planning results in a faster migration with no critical issues. The migration plan should include the following
- Rollback / Contingency Plan
- Data Cleanup and Deduplication
- Data upload to cloud (using internet vs hard drive)
A company should consider the size of its databases and applications to determine the best way of moving its data. For smaller workloads, the data can be moved using the company’s Internet connection. For large workloads, however, the data should first be compressed to prevent long transfer times. An alternative to this approach is sharing the physical drives with the provider so that high bandwidth costs can be avoided.
After moving all the data, all connections should be carefully tested to ensure that every application is working as expected and internal components are communicating properly.
3. Validation, Management, and Optimization to Implement Cloud Migration
After you implement Cloud Migration, the validation process for applications, data, and accessibility is a necessary next step.
End users should be able to access the applications without issue so that business continuity is not affected.
Companies then should use cloud monitoring tools to find and fix any issue that might arise with the cloud environment. The last step is the optimization of the cloud infrastructure to make the systems airtight and maximize the ROI.
To learn more about how PreludeSys can enable you to implement cloud migration to accelerate your Digital Transformation journey, talk to our team!
