Assessing and Mapping Your Cloud Migration

There’s an ever-increasing demand for lower costs and better functionality from your IT infrastructure. As organizations look to move to the cloud, the need for comprehensive pre-assessment is amplified by their insatiable desire to meet service quality expectations for customers. Through careful planning and foresight, you can streamline the migration process, and make sure that you’re prepared for bumps in the road towards your cloud-based future.

Considerations for Your Cloud Roadmap

A detailed plan containing your objectives and requirements is hugely beneficial when undergoing a cloud migration. Here are some points to consider during this initial assessment stage:

  • Justifying Cloud Migration for Your Business – Moving to the cloud doesn’t give you automatic results; it merely offers a solid foundation for success to occur. You should start by determining what tangible benefits the cloud can provide for your business if any. By outlining your business objectives in advance, you’ll be able to curate a functional cloud infrastructure strategy with ease.

  • Determine Workload Requirements and Desired Outcomes – Every single piece of software you use will have requirements to function. This may force you to change software vendors due to the operating systems available in the cloud. You should research each hosting platform, determining whether your software is cloud-ready, or whether it requires augmentation to function in the cloud. Be sure to analyze the breadth of cloud-native tools on offer with each provider, and try to quantify their value against your business objectives.

  • Model Your Cloud Operations – When moving to the cloud, the way in which your employees' work will have to change. With complicated virtual desktops and web applications being standard in the cloud, your staff may need to undergo training before they can effectively work on these new systems. Each department will also need to remap its everyday processes and workflows, in response to these changes.

  • Estimate the Timescale and Budgetary Impact of Migration – For each provider, you’ll find tools on their website that estimate the monthly and annual costs of your infrastructure in the cloud. This allows you to forecast the budgetary impact of your move to the cloud, so you can make the necessary changes to sustain positive cash flow. When orchestrating a move, you may need to enlist the help of your independent software vendors. Knowing the timescales for each part of the migration process can help you schedule meetings with vendors, minimizing the costs associated with development and integration assistance during your migration.

  • Determine the Migration Order for Applications – The migration process will occur in stages, meaning you need to prioritize the order in which applications are moved to the cloud. For software packages with dependency on other software packages, their migration should be batched together to minimize service downtime. Overall, you should aim to quickly migrate low-priority systems and deal with any problems that occur. With business-critical apps, you should do the opposite and replicate for testing in the cloud.

  • Test to Avoid Stress – There are going to be problems during the migration of business-critical applications. The new infrastructure means an entirely new configuration is needed for your application to function. You should replicate your business-critical software, and place it into a testbed instance on your platform of choice. Once you have ironed out bugs and adequately configured it for use in the cloud, you can redirect relevant network traffic from your old system to the new, performing a seamless service handover.

  • Shared Security Responsibilities – Don’t be afraid to quiz your platform host on their security competence. If you are migrating a sensitive application to the cloud, your provider should offer reassurance in the form of tailored security policies to guarantee that your data is protected.

Formulate a Cloud Roadmap with Trianz

Trianz is a leading cloud strategy and assessment provider, with the foresight and experience required to facilitate seamless cloud migrations for their clients. Our top-down approach to infrastructure assessment leaves no stone unturned, ensuring the compatibility and availability of your services in the cloud from day one.

Get in touch with our cloud strategy and assessment team, and shift your workloads to the future foundation of computing with Trianz today!

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