Strategize
your migration to the cloud with minimal disruption to your business. The task
may sound simple, but migrating to the cloud can be strenuous and problematic
if you don’t have a sound strategy in place. Luckily, you can mitigate risk and
help your company succeed with these five steps to a winning cloud migration
strategy.
1. Assess Your Team’s
You know your team. You know their technical
capabilities and tactical prowess. You should answer these four questions about
your team.
Do they have the language
programming skills to build applications optimized for the cloud?
Do they have the chops to roll out the appropriate infrastructure to run these applications?
Who’s going to handle new releases and communicate updates to employees and/or customers?
Who is managing the security, maintenance and monitoring of the cloud(s)?
Cloud migration will require lots of training, so hiring an external consultant that’s been down this road might be prudent during this process. Equip your team with the right skills and it should be smooth sailing..
2. What Cloud Migration is & What it Means for Your Organization
Understanding the basic concepts of cloud migration is important, but it’s duly important to understand what cloud migration means for your company. Every path to cloud migration is different. Will your company go the hybrid route? Or will your company push in all the chips at once? Will some applications stay? Will some applications go? You need to understand the risks of each approach and make the decision that best suits your business, especially if you have large, complex applications on board.
3. Public or Private? Maybe a bit of both?
What’s the difference you ask? Private: Your company hosts the solution and you’re in charge of all the management, the maintenance and the updating of data centers. Public: An outside company does all those things for you. Maybe you need a bit of both? Public and private! Either way, you have options. Understanding these options will help you reduce risk, time and cost. If you’re a larger company and want more control, maybe private is the right path. If you’re a smaller company but want to reduce lead times in testing and deploy as fast as the larger companies, maybe public is the right path.
4. Container-based Architecture
While container-based architecture will certainly change the way your team operates, it’s really the main benefit when switching to the cloud. Containerization allows your development teams to deploy software efficiently and consistently, regardless of environment. You’ll be able to separate your services to keep running even if others fail, making your applications more dependent. You can also run your containers virtually anywhere.
5. Communicate with Your Team
Selecting the right architecture and building the right cloud solution depends greatly on team communication. Everyone from Marketing to Sales will have concerns and questions and grievances, and not everyone will be on board with cloud migration, but it’s important to take the time to listen to your team so that everything is on the table and everyone
feels heard.
Did any of these steps were missing in your failed cloud migration strategy?
