Cloud Migration: Due to the great benefits that the cloud offers, many companies are choosing to migrate their environment as a strategic alternative to reduce IT costs, increase flexibility and strengthen the security of their data.
But you might have to deal with performance and security issues during the cloud migration process. However, some practices can help you neutralize these risks and threats quickly.
With that in mind, in this checklist, we separate some tips on best practices for successfully carrying out your migration.
Check out all the points you should pay attention to for a headache-free migration:
Choose A Good Provider
- What are the technologies and support offered? Do they meet the specific demands of your project?
- Does the vendor make its policy regarding data security clear?
- What is the company’s SLA level?
- What level of support does the company provide (ideally 24×7)?
- Is the vendor up-to-date on its IT infrastructure and equipment?
- Does the vendor have a proven track record of successful migrations?
Plan A Well-Structured Strategy
- Do a cost analysis: what is the company’s cost to keep the applications in the internal/physical infrastructure? (this involves costs of energy, cooling, physical space, and equipment);
- Do a resource utilization analysis: are there idle resources or resources you will need to hire?
- What is the company’s capacity to scale its operations? What is the capacity and response time?
- Has access to IT tools had a success rate?
- Conduct testing in the pre-migration phase: Thoroughly study both the old and new system, planning all test scenarios and their strategies.
Define The Migration Objectives
- What are the business needs?
- What type of infrastructure would best position the business to succeed?
- What is the purpose of carrying out this migration?
- What are the benefits that the cloud will bring to my business?
- What results do I intend to achieve by migrating to the cloud?
Choose Your Cloud Type
- Check how flexible the supplier is to your specific needs;
- Check whether the supplier’s standards and service are in line with the technical environment, workloads, and the company’s management model;
- Verify that the vendor’s cloud architectures, standards, and services meet your workloads and management preferences;
- Choose the ideal model of cloud services for your company:
- Private
- Cloud Hybrid
- Cloud Public Cloud
Determine What Will Be Migrated, People And Deadlines
- Determine what will be migrated to the cloud, when, and how;
- Define what will be migrated first;
- What will be the project downtime?
- Understand if the vendor can fill skills gaps in their migration teams or if support is limited (as with some large-scale public cloud providers);
- Map out project tasks, deciding who will do what;
- Choose permanent internal professionals to monitor the migration;
- If you opt for managed services, train your employees to be aware of the provider’s cloud, the risks, and their responsibilities.
Invest In Security
- Assess the cloud provider’s data and system security levels;
- Assess the maturity of governance and security processes;
- Ensure vendor security experts handle regulatory compliance for you;
- Implement access control for users based on their roles and tasks they perform ( RBAC ), determining who has access to the management layer, application, and network;
- Invest in the backup routine that best suits your strategy (ensuring that data is protected from possible loss during migration):
- full backup
- Full Backup
- Incremental backup
Migration Of The Environment
- Decide what will be migrated;
- Document what (all types of data) you are migrating, as well as why you are migrating it and where;
- Map out what your applications’ dependencies are and how this will reflect in the cloud;
- Do the migration in stages, defining an order of migration of data and applications, always starting with the non-critical ones;
- Do not rush the process of mapping data to fields in the new system;
- Conduct testing during migration:
- ensure that all data that must be migrated has been migrated.
- ensure that data is migrated to the correct locations.
- Conduct post-migration testing: frequently test database access and cloud system functionality. This step is crucial to verify whether demand will be met adequately after the migration.
- If there are any errors with the import, don’t panic: find and fix them.
Conclusion
Migrating your business data is like moving your valuables from one house to another. You must plan everything carefully so that your most valuable assets (data) get safely where they need to be.
Unless the company has experience in physical data center migration projects to the cloud, it is essential to have an expert partner in the field to lead the transition. But be careful: knowing how to choose the ideal cloud provider is very important.
Also Read: Cloud Technology: 5 Benefits Of Using It For Your Company