What Should You Consider Before Migrating to the Cloud?

It’s amazing how fast people have embraced the cloud. Five years ago, if you were to mention a cloud solution to many owners of small to midsized businesses (SMBs), you’d get a lot of questions and skepticism. Now the pendulum has swung in the opposite direction, and it’s seen as the go-to solution for almost everything. 

Cloud solutions have opened up a wealth of possibilities and help level the playing field for SMBs. It’s true. But getting there — and securing your data — requires skills that aren’t always easy to come by for in-house IT teams. So before you make the move, here’s what you should know. 

The Risks of Not Having a Thorough Cloud Migration Strategy 

When it comes to cloud migration, there are many things you can get wrong. Without a solid strategy in place, here is just a short list of problems that could come up: 

• Unexpected costs
• Data corruption or loss 
• Interruptions, downtime, and other performance issues
• Incompatibility issues with legacy systems
• Staff frustration and poor adoption rates
• Data governance or compliance issues 

10 Things To Consider Before Migrating to the Cloud 

The migration alone is a complex project. Taking the time to answer each of these questions before the big day (or days) can help you save quite a bit of time and money.

1.  How Will You Approach This? 

Cloud migrations are one of those projects that are difficult to overthink. And sometimes just creating a list of exactly what needs to be migrated by when can be illuminating. In the process, you may have answered your next question… 

2. Who Will Do the Work? 

Will you work with a provider or build your own cloud solution? There are benefits and drawbacks to both.

Internal

If you plan to build your own cloud, your team of IT experts needs to be able to develop, deploy, manage, and maintain your cloud infrastructure. With their deep understanding of your business and requirements for transitioning to the cloud, they can potentially shorten your transition timeline. But building a cloud isn't a simple process, and like I mentioned before, there are risks if you get it wrong. 

Provider

A cloud provider will work with you to define your wants and needs and identify what potential problems you may face. Your provider can also design a cloud solution that fits your specifications. And best yet — a good cloud migration provider will do this kind of thing all the time, and they’ll already understand how to minimize any risks.

3. What Will Move and What Will Work Differently? 

Identifying what you’re hoping to recreate or optimize in the cloud can help you get a better idea of the costs and skills needed. It also might reveal that some systems outside of your migration plan will also have to be updated. So before the big move, you’ll also need to answer a few big questions: 

• What business software will actually work in the cloud? 
• Will the vendor for your current business software support it in the cloud? 
• What apps need to talk to each other? 
• What switches and servers do you have in place, and what is your current WAN environment? 

A Note About Cloud Bandwidth Requirements

One thing we frequently notice is that businesses will fail to anticipate the demands more cloud computing solutions will place on their network. If you haven’t yet updated to an SD-WAN, you may need one if you’re going to make your migration smooth. 

4. Which Cloud Migration Strategy Is Best? 

There are R’s of cloud migration. They are: 

• Retain
• Rehost  (a.k.a. lift and shift)
• Retire
• Replatform
• Repurchase (a.k.a. drop and shop)
• Refactor/rearchitect

They each have their pros and cons, and your total cloud migration will probably involve more than one of these. 

5. Which Cloud(s) Will You Use? 

Do you want your cloud to be public, private, or a hybrid of both? Each method has its own advantages and disadvantages.

Public Cloud Solutions

The first option is a public cloud, which means both services and infrastructure are accessible over the Internet. Public clouds are highly efficient but also have more vulnerabilities than private clouds. Typically, businesses will choose a public cloud when remote collaboration is required, and security is not a primary concern.

Private Cloud Solutions

In private clouds, both services and infrastructure operate over a private network (within a firewall that is under your control). Private clouds offer a lot of control and additional security but with increased expenses due to required maintenance and support. Generally, businesses will choose a private cloud when customer privacy and security are both major issues and the business is large enough to manage (and afford) its own cloud.

Hybrid Cloud Solutions

Hybrid clouds combine the benefits of both public and private clouds but require knowledge and the ability to operate on multiple platforms. Typically, businesses will choose a hybrid cloud if they need to keep some data under strict security (e.g. customer transaction info) and other data under standard security.

Ultimately, the choice of cloud type depends on your business. A quality cloud services provider can analyze your business and help you make the best decision. 

6.  What Do You Need To Do To Prepare Your Data and Infrastructure? 

You’ll need to make sure that your IT infrastructure is ready before you start your migration, and that you’ve securely backed up your data and other critical systems. 

7. What Tools Will You Need? 

Depending on which apps you’re hoping to migrate, you may need to install a decent number of cloud migration apps to actually make the move. 

8. How Should You Pick the Big Day(s)? 

Many teams will choose to do the actual migration itself during off hours. There’s lower internet traffic, and it can be less disruptive to businesses. But for larger migrations, a phased approach may be better. Here are the pros and cons of each. 

Phased Conversion

With a phased conversion, your business migrates to the cloud one step at a time. A phased conversion takes longer and interrupts daily operations for an extended period of time, but offers an easier learning curve for employees.

Immediate Transition

Unlike a phased approach, an immediate conversion results in your entire business migrating to the cloud over a short period of time. Your business will face minimal loss in productivity, but there can be a steep learning curve for employees unfamiliar with cloud computing.

9. How Will You Verify Success?

Immediately after your migration, you’ll need to confirm that your data has been transferred completely and accurately, that every transferred app is performing as expected, and that any new backup and recovery systems are working correctly. 

Especially after an immediate transition that occurred during off-hours, you may also wish to simulate a high-traffic scenario to make sure your new system is up to the challenge. 

10. How Will You Optimize Performance Over Time? 

Many cloud tools make it easy to monitor performance. But over time, you may find that you can save money by scaling back on some of your tools. You should also ask end users in various departments about how these tools are helping them be more productive and where adjustments may need to be made. 

Your Cloud Computing Checklist 

One important question was missing from this blog, and that’s should you migrate to the cloud? Is that where your time and resources are best spent in the near future? Cloud computing is often a great way for smaller organizations to do more with less. But it’s not the be-all, end-all solution for every organization, all the time. 

Our cloud team put together a more comprehensive checklist to get a better sense of how your organization might benefit from making the move. Click the link below to access it!