If you’ve been following this series on cloud migration, you’ve put in a lot of hard work and made it all the way to the end. From evaluating your current needs and goals to reviewing your disaster plan, you’ve completed all seven steps and prepared your business for a successful move to the cloud.
Now that you’ve finished the prep work, you might be wondering what’s next. In this final blog post, we’ll go over what you’ll need to do to make the actual move to the cloud.
Previous Cloud Migration Steps
First, here are all of the previous entries in this guide if you’d like to review them.
Step 1: Know Your Current Needs and Goals
Step 2: Determine Your Future Needs and Goals
Step 3: Consider Your Current Obligations
Step 4: Determine the Impact of Inaccessible Systems
Step 5: Review Your Bandwidth Performance
Step 6: Review Line of Business Application Performance
Step 7: Review Your Current Disaster Plan
What’s Next
After working through those 7 steps, you’re ready to move on to the next and final stages in the cloud migration process. You’ve already laid the foundation for a successful transition; now these tasks will help you complete the switch effectively.
1. Develop requirements and gather resources. You’ll need a certain amount of resources in terms of time, tools, and personnel to carry out the transition to the cloud. Evaluate what you’ll need ahead of time and make sure that everything and everyone you need will be available.
2. Test and plan. You should never carry out any sort of major project or transition for your business without first planning ahead and testing to ensure everything works like you expected. Here are some important tips for the testing and planning phase.
- Setting up a side-by-side testing environment is your best bet; however, keep in mind this might not work for every solution.
- Set up a trial, POC (proof of concept) or POV (proof of value). Even though you have to dedicate internal resources to getting the trial up and running or pay outsourced IT services to get this going, performing a trial can provide you with a valuable simulated experience before you shift to the cloud.
- Having systems up side-by-side can prove costly; but if you move and performance bottoms out, you will lose even more money.
- Identify a fallback strategy. What will you do if your cloud-based applications/services don’t perform at the level you expected? If you planned accordingly and took measures such as adding extra bandwidth to your facility you should be in the clear; however, its always good to play it safe.
- User groups that are more single dimensional and/or aren’t as significantly affected by the transition should move first. On the other hand, more complicated or power users who need more hand holding and will feel the impact more can migrate later and/or in isolation. What if one power user in a group of such end users transitions while others keep leveraging older solutions?
3. Migrate. Finally, all of your hard work has paid off and it’s time to actually migrate. First, ensure you have a well thought out backup plan and resources available to help users/identify any issues that occur during the move. Hopefully, though, with all the planning you’ve done, your end users won’t notice a thing.
Congratulations on completing all of the steps in our guide to successfully migrating to the cloud! If you have any questions or need assistance with anything related to the cloud, our expert team can help. Just give us a call at 877-599-3999 or email sales@stratospherenetworks.com.
