7 Steps To Include In Your Cloud Migration Strategies

Enterprises are increasingly moving their operations to the cloud as the benefits offered by the cloud have outpaced traditional delivery models. Unlimited access to virtually limitless computer resources, cost reduction, and better security are just some of the key reasons to switch. Like any other investment, having a water-tight plan is critical before moving your data, workloads, or applications from your on-premises or legacy infrastructure to the cloud. Partnering with a reliable cloud migration services provider is at the core of any successful cloud migration journey.

Before starting with your migration journey, you must work with your cloud migration service provider on three important aspects.

Step-By-Step Guide to Create a Cloud Migration Strategy

Each business possesses its unique vision, goals, and interests, necessitating a tailored cloud strategy that aligns with its specific needs. To navigate this transformative process successfully, a well-defined, step-by-step methodology must be followed to ensure a smooth and seamless transition to the cloud.

Our comprehensive cloud migration process is designed to deliver efficiency and effectiveness, empowering businesses to confidently achieve their migration goals. Let's explore the key steps involved.

Identify And Prioritize Key Components For Migration

Begin your migration plan with a clear picture of the core infrastructure components of your legacy system. Identify the interdependencies between technology components, applications, and services. Deploy Service Mapping to discover all application services in your organization and create a comprehensive dependency diagram to map all devices, applications, and configurations in your current system. An ideal migration plan always starts with migrating the services that have the fewest dependencies followed by the services which are closest to your customers.

Create A Well-Defined Migration Architecture

Establishing a meticulous architectural plan is crucial to driving your migration effort. The architecture should define the refactoring effort, infrastructure requirements, and migration strategy. It should also cover production switchover mechanisms and prioritize the components to be migrated.

Choose The Migration Strategy

IT assets to be migrated will have unique needs based on performance, cost, and complexity and hence there is no one-size-fits-all plan. Therefore, you must analyze the current and future state of your system to choose a cloud migration strategy in line with your specific needs and capabilities. These cloud migration strategies also known as the 6 R’s of migration would help you choose the best cloud migration strategy.

Establish Key Metrics

Define key metrics or performance indicators to identify potential problems throughout the migration process. Establish metrics against different categories such as infrastructure, applications, user experience, and business engagement. Performance metrics such as disk performance, memory usage, error rates, availability, lags, response time, and engagement rates help you pinpoint and mitigate any performance issues. Determine the key business metrics most affected by cloud migration. A well-defined metrics help you clearly measure the success of your cloud migration efforts.

Single Cloud/Hybrid Cloud Or Multi-Cloud

Choosing the right cloud environment to migrate your solutions involves multiple factors. You can opt for a single cloud provider if you want to optimize your application for a single cloud environment. On the other hand, adopting a hybrid/multi-cloud approach allows you to run certain components of your application on one provider while utilizing another provider for the remaining components. has context menu Each approach has its own pros and cons, but it’s best to choose the most suitable cloud environment based on your unique business needs.

Optimization And Cost Control

Obviously, expenses on cloud infrastructure are vastly different from your on-premises infrastructure. However, you can achieve maximum ROI on your cloud investment through careful cost predictability, efficient balancing of spend, and resource management. Expert consultation with your service provider can help you choose the right strategy towards these goals. Optimizing and controlling the cloud cost will not be a barrier in your migration journey if your provider can bring in a comprehensive set of cloud cost management capabilities. This will help you to implement FinOps processes seamlessly across cloud environments.

Security And Compliance

Security is a major challenge when migrating to the cloud. Hence, it is essential that your infrastructure remains compliant with most of the security standards. Shift your migration plan to a trusted cloud provider who offers robust tooling and resources to help you to detect and overcome security vulnerabilities and sophisticated threats. No matter which cloud platform you migrate to, make sure that your migration service provider adheres to cloud-native security services controls and existing compliance regulations used across the globe such as PCI-DSS, HIPAA/HITECH, FedRAMP, and GDPR to name a few.

Choosing The Right Migration Service Partner

The success of your migration journey depends on the expertise of your chosen cloud provider. The right partner can help you to meet your organization’s short and long-term goals. Some of the key questions you should be asking yourself are - Is your provider partnered with any major cloud provider? Do they use industry-standard tools? Are they transparent in their business processes? Do they work with multiple vendors? Are they well-versed in managing security and compliance? Gsoft ticks all the right boxes here and can serve as your trusted cloud service provider. Contact our cloud consulting experts to get all your queries answered.