Planning Cloud Migration? Check Out these Best Practices

Cloud migration is no more just a good-to-have step for organizations. It has become an inherent part of digital transformation for organizations in more than one way, which covers everything from performance and efficiency to cost optimization and faster time-to-market. In a way, application migration to cloud is highly disruptive in nature which provides a host of futuristic benefits to organizations in a very short time. So, the sooner you plan your cloud migration strategies, the better.

It is very essential to proceed with the cloud journey with additional caution while managing the continuous pressure to accelerate the process.

It is observed that successful cloud adoption requires cultural change, utmost focus, and standardization across an organization. A small mistake in cloud migration planning can cause cost impact and delays.

It is necessary to keep in mind the best practices below while planning a suitable cloud migration strategy:

1. Understand and Prioritize your Business Objectives

Business objectives are very critical to decide where you want to migrate your workloads. Without knowing the priorities of those business objectives, you may end up taking wrong decisions that can very well impact not only your application migration speed and scale, but also your IT budget.

2. Choose your Cloud Partner Wisely

You should study which cloud providers will provide an appropriate ecosystem for your organization’s portfolio? How is their support system for customers? Do you need to reach out to one cloud provider or multiple ones to avoid dependencies? How can you minimize the latency and handle security in multi-cloud scenarios? These questions would help in choosing the right cloud partner for your cloud migration.

3. Invest in Proper Training

As mentioned earlier, cloud enablement is disruptive and requires an understanding of the cultural changes. Thus, invest adequately in training your staff. By doing this, you will give them a better chance to adapt to the new ways of doing things in a timely manner.

4. Spend Enough Time on your Cloud Assessment

The utmost critical exercise in any cloud migration journey is assessment. A mindful application assessment with all the considerations like framework used, dependencies, communication, security requirements, and database access requirements, along with organization-level objectives will give you the correct application transformation option.

5. Take Baby Steps but be Firm

The excitement of realizing cloud migration benefits at an early stage and achieving business goals quickly may lead to chaos. Taking firm baby steps will lead to success. It is recommended to start with a small application that is less business-critical but leads to maximum yield. Capture learnings from these baby steps and implement them throughout the process to smoothen your application modernization journey.

6. Discover Automation Possibilities

Throughout the cloud migration journey, there are some activities that are repetitive in nature. Automation of these activities will accelerate your journey. Some of these activities can be data collection, codebase assessment, remediation of code, CI/CD implementation, etc.

7. Measure your Performance Appropriately

It is a myth that maximum performance and availability can be achieved as soon as one moves to cloud. Careful planning and properly allocated resources are needed to guarantee performance requirements post cloud migration. Benchmarking the on-premise performance of the application and validating it on cloud post-migration, followed by an appropriate measurement, will enable you to achieve the desired application performance.

8. Implement Proper Monitoring and Control Checks

Cloud vendors provide lots of services and tools to be utilized for monitoring the performance, resource utilization, and security of the deployed applications. It is always advisable to implement these tools and take corrective actions suggested by these tools on a regular basis to ensure systematic application modernization.

9. Leverage Partners Support System

Technical assistance from a cloud provider, which is usually a part of an enterprise-support package, is a valuable resource. Make it a part of your broader virtual cloud team as it can provide a central point of contact and escalation path. It can also support you as an invaluable source of technical information and guidance during and after your cloud migration.

10. Continuous Improvement

Observe continuously the changes in your cloud ecosystem and see how it can help you to create new customer value, improvise the communication between applications, and implement databases and cloud services in a new way to optimize the cloud usage for agility and economics. Continuous improvement is the key to leverage maximum benefits of cloud migration.

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