5 Strategic Steps of Cloud Migration for Successful Digital Transformation

As business enterprises pursue digital transformation to accelerate decision-making, improve processes and workflows, create superior customer experiences, and generate more revenue streams, the cloud can act as a catalyst. It can position the machine first approach and enable enterprises to automate their business processes and plug into humongous on-demand computing power at lower costs than legacy computing architectures. The cloud is a critical computing resource for enterprises to create disruptive models and achieve flexibility, affordability, and scalability.

Statistically, the spending on public cloud services is going to reach a whopping $397.5 billion (source: Cloudwards.net). Also, the cloud has the potential to generate revenues between $100 billion and $170 billion for healthcare companies by 2030 (Source: McKinsey). Maintained by service providers at remote data centers, cloud technology has become the cornerstone of digital transformation for enterprises. It is a no brainer that to remain competitive, businesses have to migrate to the cloud along with their legacy systems. Joining a cloud migration platform entails taking a number of strategic steps as mentioned below:   

5 steps businesses should take to achieve a successful cloud migration

The key steps that are critical to achieving a successful cloud application migration solution are as follows:

1. Create a goals-based cloud migration strategy: Enterprises are willing to develop cloud strategies based on their future needs and current IT infrastructure and capabilities. However, the competitive environment of today won’t allow enterprises that are smug and caught in inertia to survive. They need to make a cloud migration readiness assessment to understand their competitive position, determine their migration goals, and analyze their strengths and weaknesses. For instance, they must decide whether they want to achieve business agility, bolster security to mitigate risks, reduce reliance on legacy systems, convert CapEx to OpEx, or switch to a DevOps approach

Nevertheless, before choosing one or more of the above options, businesses should ensure their strategy is business-focused and developed in collaboration with the real stakeholders. Importantly, the outcomes for cloud migration testing and the way they should be measured must be established beforehand. To plan a robust cloud migration testing approach, businesses should engage the services of experts to help them sift through priorities and include critical things.

2. Calculate the total cost of migration: Moving away from legacy systems into unknown territory can be fraught with risks. So, while devising any cloud migration solutions, businesses should identify the risk factors and address them upfront. Remember, transitioning to a cloud-based operating environment can be costlier than anticipated. It may even transpire that after making any cloud migration risk assessment, businesses may find it difficult or not worthwhile to migrate certain workloads to the cloud. This can happen after making substantial investments in setting up the hardware infrastructure and obtaining software licensing. Besides, legacy applications may require reconfiguring or refactoring before being migrated to the cloud

Also, the new cloud-based processes may require the hiring of additional staff. To determine the total cost of migration, businesses need to break it down into individual elements, such as network bandwidth costs, data center operating costs, and disaster recovery costs, among others. Use tools to create price estimates for cloud configuration. But in all this, consider the compelling reasons for cloud migration, namely, geographic distribution, remote access, agility, and scalability, before justifying the costs.

3. Determine the things to be migrated: At the outset, it must be understood that not everything that comes under the IT infrastructure or management can be migrated. This is in spite of the phenomenal expansion of cloud architecture. So, businesses should prepare an inventory of applications, processes, and data and assess their viability for cloud migration. For instance, there is no point in moving non-essential and/or non-standardized applications that are not compatible with the cloud environment. There should be a careful examination of every legacy system and its capabilities to determine if they need to be migrated to the cloud. It should be ascertained whether the assets are going to deliver the benefits that were envisioned for cloud migration

4. Select the right cloud configuration: After determining the applications and databases to be migrated to the cloud, businesses should choose the right cloud configuration to achieve their goals. For instance, a hybrid cloud model using on-premises applications can yield optimum results for certain organizations. And each configuration may deliver distinct advantages related to control, uptime, security, and scale.

5. Include cloud migration automation: Cloud migration automation can reduce manual effort while also addressing skill gaps, productivity, and consumption. The automation efforts can involve core areas such as installing, patching code, and managing cloud services. By automating the migration effort, businesses can achieve minimal disruption during migration.  

Conclusion

Any successful cloud migration and operational readiness thereafter entails a robust cloud migration testing plan. It requires strategic planning, cultural transformation, and technical transition to realize the benefits of flexibility, agility, innovation, and scalability.