In today’s competitive business environment, there are numerous reasons to move operations to the cloud. Forward-thinking leaders recognize that cloud computing offers the opportunity to address business pain points, resulting in improved productivity combined with managed costs.
Simply put: your team can work faster and smarter with increased employee productivity and lower overhead costs.
But to make a major move to the cloud successful, you need to use the proper business tools to get the job done. This means following best practices to complete the migration quickly and efficiently without business disruption.
Think like a general here in terms of the three phases involved in migration implementation — plan your strategy, execute it and then assess your success.
1. Plan the Attack
The key to successful implementation is setting the stage. There are a lot of elements involved in switching your business operations to the cloud. The first step for any migration project, even when you’re partnering with a proven managed services provider, is to clearly establish your goals, set your targets and define what success will look like.
To do this, you’ll need to answer fundamental questions:
- How much data do you want to migrate — a single application or your entire portfolio?
- What’s your objective for moving to the cloud — saving money or transforming your business operations?
- How do you want your operations to take shape once you’ve made the move to the cloud?
- What skills will your IT team need to make this move happen?
- What will migration to the cloud ultimately mean for the bottom line?
You get the idea; it’s imperative to think this thing through in terms of how you want your business to be impacted as well as how it could be impacted.
You also need to train your staff as early and thoroughly as possible. The more they know about the migration process, the easier your transition will be.
2. Carry Out the Mission
Now that you’ve got a detailed plan, including a timetable, put it into action. A managed services provider who regularly guides business through this fraught process can establish a pathway to success from risk assessment to strategy development to project planning. That includes structuring management for the entire migration project, with a focus on your successful business outcome.
That experience is critical for government agencies and contractors who need specific guidance to design, build, manage, maintain and monitor specialized government cloud solutions.
3. Assess the Results
After you’ve migrated your data and applications, you need to follow-up to confirm migration was successful.
As Sadegh Nadimi of Amazon Web Services explains, “Having a comprehensive monitoring strategy in place will ensure you include every detail when it comes to robust architectures for your applications. Having data-driven insights into how your environment is performing will empower you to make smart business decisions when considering tradeoffs between performance and costs.”
Translation: Once you’ve got everything in place, take steps to make sure it’s all working the way you want it to work.
While this three-pronged outline sounds straightforward, there are many potential pitfalls along the way. Carefully planned and executed migration projects are our specialty. Call us for a free consultation and we’ll talk you through the process — no strings attached.
We can help you address the details of migrating to the cloud and build a pathway to success. Our expert engineers can design a successful migration process specific to your needs.
Since 1995, Manassas Park, VA-based V2 Systems has employed local systems administrators, network engineers, security consultants, help desk technicians and partnering companies to meet a wide range of clients’ IT needs, from research, to implementation, to maintenance. Concentrate on your VISION…We’ll handle the TECHNOLOGY!