7 Strategic Steps of Cloud Migration for Successful Digital Transformation
By acting as a catalyst for digital transformation, the Cloud can help businesses accelerate decision-making, improve processes and workflows, provide better customer experiences, and generate new revenue streams. The Cloud has the potential to position the machine-first approach, allowing businesses to automate routine processes while freeing up time for strategic tasks. It is self-evident that businesses must migrate to the cloud to ensure continuous growth. How to carry out cloud migration and avoid pitfalls?
The seven steps to successful cloud migration are outlined below.
- Set up clear goals.
Before adopting the Cloud, you have to understand the reason behind this decision. Why are doing this? What do you expect? Enterprises are willing to develop cloud strategies based on their future needs and current IT infrastructure and capabilities. Define clear measurable goals and prioritize them before you start the migration process.
- Apply metrics and KPIs.
Metrics and KPIs will help you to measure project efficiency and make a judgement about an overall migration success. A clear understanding of KPIs will help your team to detect potential issues and timely resolve them. Metrics can include technical indicators such as system availability, page load time etc.
- Assign your migration team or choose an experienced outsourcer.
Every cloud migration project must be accomplished by a specialized team. You may go allocate your internal resources or go for an outsourcing option. The final decision must address your business needs. Usually a cloud migration team includes, but not limited to a Project manager, Cloud Solutions architect, system administrator, security manager, compliance specialist.
- Choose your cloud provider.
Prior to starting your cloud migration, choose a cloud provider that fits your requirements. The provider should be experienced in data migration and have a good reputation for post-migration support. Pay attention to your future provider’s customer service and approach to communication.
- Create data backup.
Backup your data before the database migration in case if something goes wrong. Data backup protects you from falling a victim of unforeseen circumstances and ensures that you will not loose any important files and documents even in the worst-case scenario.
- Complete migration process.
There are several ways of organizing migration process. You might move all apps and data at the same time or split migration into stages. Whatever option you choose, always double-check a project flow at every stage.
- Evaluate migration process based on KPIs and metrics.
Review the metrics and KPIs that have been set at the beginning and compare them to previous metrics from on-premises environments to finalize your cloud migration. If there is no drop-off in performance or if it has improved, you can safely consider the migration a success.
