Is your business ready to migrate to the cloud? Migrating to the cloud is one of the main ways for companies to grow, as it allows them to work more efficiently, increase flexibility, accessibility and cybersecurity. In order to take advantage of all the benefits the cloud has to offer, it is highly desirable to plan ahead. Here are a few things to think about before moving to the cloud.
Establish a migration plan: Once the migration objective is clear, the applications to be migrated and the team is ready, the next step is to establish a cloud migration plan. This plan should describe the migration process step by step. To plan this process, you need to know which components will be moved and decide on the order according to the priority or difficulty of the migration. Once we have decided an order, we will assign these components to a phase of the implementation, thus creating a staggered system in a way that minimises the impact on the organisation, while reducing the risks of the migration, but increasing the period of time needed for the migration.
Training: A key aspect is the formation of a team to oversee the transition. The team’s main objective is to manage the migration from start to finish. If the company does not have cloud specialists, consideration should be given to hiring a cloud migration specialist to ease the transition.
Cloud Provider: You should then compare different cloud platforms and migration models to choose the right one for your business. Migrating to the cloud is not an easy task, which is why it is essential to choose the most suitable cloud provider. For this reason it is necessary to know the needs of the company and, once known, you must take into account the features, additional services and costs involved in one provider or another in order to get the most out of the cloud environment and minimise your costs as much as possible. Not all providers offer the same services, and there are price differences depending on the service and provider you choose.
Know the KPIs: Before moving anything to the cloud, a baseline analysis of each of your applications should be drawn up. There are many different key performance indicators (KPIs) that you can track, depending on the applications running. Here are some common KPIs: load or run speed, average session duration, error rates, etc.
Design an infrastructure strategy: One of the first steps before migrating to the cloud is to build a solid migration architecture, as well as having a strategy that involves all component departments, and to determine whether the company is ready for the process of moving to a new system.
Security: Your company is responsible for your customers’ valuable and confidential data as well as your own. At all times, you need to know where it is and make sure it is safe, so it is important that you are fully aware of the cloud provider’s security policies and standards before you deploy your applications on their platform.
Costs: Before moving your data to the cloud you should consider the costs to the business, such as the total cost of internal resources, infrastructure changes and timeframes.
To take full advantage of the benefits offered by the cloud, it is important to have a team of experts in cloud infrastructure and development. Geko‘s team has experience in different areas, working with DevOps methodology and guaranteeing our clients 100% adaptation to their infrastructures and technologies when migrating to the cloud.