7 Step Guide to Successfully Migrating to the Cloud: Determine the Impact of Inaccessible Systems

cloud migrationIf you’ve been following our series on completing a successful move to the cloud, you’ve made a lot of progress by considering your current and future needs and goals, as well as evaluating your present obligations like subscriptions and leases. At this point, you’re ready to move on to the fourth step in our guide to cloud migration: determining the impact of your IT systems becoming temporarily inaccessible.

Before we dive in, here are the previous entries in this series if you’d like to review them first.

Step 1: Know Your Current Needs and Goals

Step 2: Determine Your Future Needs and Goals

Step 3: Consider Your Current Obligations

Step 4: What IT System Inaccessibility Means for You
Moving applications and data to the cloud typically increases accessibility, since end users gain the ability to work from anywhere as long as they have a secure Internet connection. However, you’ll need to anticipate temporarily losing access during the migration process (although your business and service/solution provider can work to make the transition as seamless as possible).

Here are a couple of crucial questions you’ll want to ask yourself to ensure you know what you’re getting into and how your IT systems becoming inaccessible would impact your organization.

Who would be affected by your systems becoming inaccessible?
It’s important to consider which groups would experience disruption if your applications/data become unreachable. Your staff members will probably see a drop in productivity as a result of temporarily losing access to tools and information they need to complete their work. This, in turn, could affect both current and prospective clients, in addition to your vendors.

How much will you lose financially?
IT system inaccessibility likely means your employees won’t be able to complete their work, and that will have a direct impact on your business. For example, if you have 30 workers who earn $15 per hour, you’ll lose the equivalent of $450 worth of labor for every hour of downtime. Additionally, you’ll want to consider the average cost of losing prospective customers who might not be able to reach you and could consequently decide to turn to someone else.

Downtime and not having access to data centers can prove incredibly costly: The average cost of a data center outage is $740,357, according to the 2016 Cost of Data Center Outages repot from Emerson Network Power and the Ponemon Institute. In preparation for cloud migration (as well as for any unplanned disasters and outages), it’s also important to ensure you have a backup solution in place so you can recover your data if anything goes wrong.

Ultimately, you should work with your cloud provider to minimize system inaccessibility while also anticipating the effect downtime could have on your business. If you have any questions about accessibility and the cloud migration process, feel free to reach out to our team of tech experts by emailing sales@stratospherenetworks.com or calling 877-599-3999. And watch our blog for the next step in our guide to successfully moving to the cloud.

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