A 4-Step cloud migration guide for your business

When your business grows, you want to choose an infrastructure that will support and streamline that development, and not stifle it. With that in mind, many modern businesses choose to migrate their operations to the cloud and maintain their stability for years to come, without compromising their data security, internal organization, or productivity. On the contrary, selecting the right cloud allows you to scale your business while you focus on your day-to-day responsibilities.

However, the process of cloud migration poses a challenge even for versed business owners. You need to make sure that you’ve chosen the right structure, provider, and features to keep your business stable and scalable in the process and beyond. Before you move on to the actual migration, it’s best to do some research, create a thorough plan for the transfer, and of course, test before launch. Here’s a brief guide to simplify the process for you and make it easier for you to migrate your business to the cloud.

Prepare all shareholders for the migration

Yes, the choice of the cloud itself and your business are two very important players in this process. However, all of the people who will take part in the migration and who will be affected by the migration also need to know how this choice will impact their work, what they need to do to prepare, and what their specific role is.

You’ll assign shareholders in the migration procedure to tackle different tasks, whether it’s monitoring application performance, ensuring security compliance, or training other employees to tackle the migration.

Ensure that communication during every stage of cloud migration is seamless, and train your teams beforehand to understand what they can expect during and after it is complete. This is a pivotal step in your preparation so as to minimize the risk of human error, which is always a possibility and can affect the process and the performance of your new cloud structure.

Consider the right cloud capabilities

When you research different cloud providers, you’ll notice that each solution has its own specific capabilities, from storage capacity, application management, built-in security, all the way to scalability. These and other factors are vital when you choose the right provider for your own business. Growing businesses with complex operations can benefit from selecting an enterprise cloud infrastructure that ensures stability, high levels of security, and allows you to scale and expand your business more easily.

Clouds that utilize hyper-converged technology also offer numerous advantages to such enterprises, simply because they are more agile and enable your business to employ numerous complex processes simultaneously without hurting productivity or performance.

Since cloud migration is not something you’ll do on a regular basis, it’s best to do your research thoroughly and select a solution that makes sense for you not just in the present moment, but for the foreseeable future, as well.

Keep the process secure

Inherent security features of your chosen cloud structure could either exceed or be lower than your previous security levels. This is a key issue you need to address before you migrate to the cloud so that you can implement added security measures for specific applications or data collections, and prevent losing key information in the process.

Your security experts should be able to create a risk-mitigation strategy to prevent breaches and to make the most of the cloud’s existing security measures. The same applies to legal compliance as well as disaster recovery since you need to be prepared for any eventuality. The migration itself needs to be conducted with the needed security protocols in mind, so your entire team should be prepared for this step.

Evaluate and adapt 

You already know how well your core applications and systems used to operate on a daily basis – this is your first set of parameters to use for comparison once your migration is complete. Once you’ve migrated to the cloud, you should reevaluate all of your business components that are now residing on the cloud, so as to compare and contrast their current performance metrics and see if there are any negative discrepancies you should address.

While the cloud naturally gives more leeway to your applications and data management solutions to work more seamlessly, some apps might need added adjustment post-migration. Keep monitoring the performance of each of your tools every day for at least a month, and then use the data to establish what you can do to maximize the potential of the cloud to serve your business better.

Each business will have a unique path for the migration process, but the integral elements of this decision remain the same no matter the scope of your operations or the industry you come from.

Consider this a simplified guide for this intricate process, and a reminder of the key steps you’ll need to take if you want to reap the most rewards from your new business structure. The cloud might be inherently beneficial for companies of all sizes, but you’ll only be able to benefit from it if you brace yourself for the migration and maximize your potential to use it in the years to come.