As more businesses begin incorporating digital practices into their daily operations, one that seems to be cropping up everywhere is cloud migration. This involves moving the workload and applications used over to the cloud. This is to allow easy access for all employees and provide a higher level of security for the data you work with. To ensure your change goes to plan, it’s a good idea to look at cloud migration strategies. So, to help you on your way, here’s a step-by-step guide on how to successfully migrate to the cloud.
What Needs To Move?
First, you’ll need to do an overhaul of all your documents and applications. This means you need to go through and see what exactly needs to be moved over to the cloud. Some data may now be out of date and applications redundant, so instead of bringing them over with the migration, remove them beforehand to speed up the process.
Plan Your Migration
Make sure to set out with an end goal in mind for the migration. Carefully plan who your chosen provider will be, what needs to be moved over, and how quick does the process need to be. Ensuring you have a deadline in mind will keep your migration on track and stop any potential delays for other employees.
The Six R Strategies
When you’ve chosen your provider and are all set to start the migration, there are six strategies that you can utilise to help your migration go smoothly.
1. Rehost
This strategy is what most people would find the easiest way to migrate. You simply move all your applications and data directly across to the cloud. However, if you don’t go through what you currently have before migrating, you may find that you bring over useless data or defunct applications. This strategy is useful when you’ve already done this so you can ensure you’re only bringing across what’s necessary.
2. Replatform
Replatforming allows you to move over what you need to the cloud but also allows you to replace some applications with cloud versions. This makes the applications more efficient and can provide a better user experience for employees.
3. Repurchase
If you use a lot of different software or applications for your business operations, you may be used to renewing licenses every so often. Repurchasing means you end the current license you hold with an application and then move over to the cloud version. This means you’ll move less over to the cloud and can help to speed up the process. There might be some changes to the software when you switch to the cloud version, so it’s best practice to make sure everyone is aware of any potential differences.
4. Retire
Retiring is effectively what the name suggests. If you no longer use certain software, you may find you don’t need to bring it across to your new cloud platform.
5. Refactor
This strategy can be slightly costly, as it means you adapt a current application or piece of software to allow it to run on the cloud. This strategy can be useful if an essential application you use doesn’t have a cloud alternative. You can then work with developers to help update it so that you can migrate it over and not have to retire it.
6. Retain
Sometimes you might not find a cloud alternative to an indispensable piece of software, but you can’t refactor or retire it. On this occasion, you may wish to retain it and keep it off the cloud. This way you’ll still be able to continue your usual business operations without disruption.
Cloud migration will force you to consider what’s really important to the running of your business. It will also allow you to see where changes need to be made and how you can improve the daily operations for everyone. Migrating over to a cloud platform can seem like a huge task, but if you arm yourself with the above strategies and plan ahead, you’ll be sure to see the long-term benefits. And be sure to have someone by your side to support your migration. Moving your whole organization data to cloud will be a daunting task and you, sure don’t want to risk it all. Hence you need someone to support your digital transformation all the way from start to finish. Get some expert’s advice from Dataknox. They are the best when it comes to cloud migration support and they will surely make it easy for you, no matter how large your organization data is. They will also make sure that your old orthodox data centers get dismantled in a proper way without any probability of any data leakage and more! They are the best IT asset disposition services providers.
