The rise of automation and innovative technologies have influenced both leading and emerging companies to shift their processing workloads into a cloud. Moreover, most enterprises aspire to move toward the cloud, including private cloud, software as a service (SaaS), platform as a service (PaaS), and infrastructure as a service (IaaS) to lower their IT hosting and operation costs. This transition will further help build advanced IT environments capable of fast, integrated, and highly automated development and operations.

The COVID-19 pandemic and its subsequent need to accelerate enterprise digitization have also lent new urgency to cloud use. However, moving applications and data to cloud platforms, especially for large companies with complex IT infrastructures, involves a myriad of operational, financial, and security issues. Some companies have also cited the complications and costs around migration as key inhibitors of cloud adoption.

There are, however, strategies to ease the transition to the cloud and ensure it is on time and within budget. This article divulges four future-proof practices for cloud migration.

 

Planning Guarantees Effective Cloud Migration

The first step to consider before migrating is to be clear on your reasons for the migration and the strategy that can best support them. By accessing the current environment, it is essential to determine the cloud server requirements to avoid spending more resources.

As it is not practical to simultaneously migrate all data and applications to the cloud, companies must determine migration priorities. They can ideally focus on the cloud migration of specific data and applications that can improve performance at a large scale and ensure cost savings.

 

Choosing Cloud Environment for Secure and Efficient Transition

With the first step of cloud migration practices—planning—in place, it’s time to decide the kind of cloud model that you want to adopt or relevant services offered by cloud providers to serve your current and future needs. When choosing a cloud environment, enterprises must determine the advantages of cloud migration in three dimensions—architectural improvements, operational benefits, and cost savings.

 

Making a Secure Migration of Apps and Data to Cloud

The actual migration of apps and data to the preferred cloud should be smooth sailing, given that you have planned and selected the environment accurately. It is imperative to note that each workload element should be proven to work efficiently in the new environment before migrating another element. This helps reduce the risk of impacting the business operations with the inability of users to access data.

 

Keeping Up with Ongoing Process and Validating Post-Migration Success

When the migration is taking place, it is important to sync and update your systems, and also synchronize changes made to the source data. Another consideration to keep in mind is security concerns including planning for data backup and recovery and complying with security policies.

Cloud migration isn’t deemed successful without the evidence that it is secure, optimized, and easily retrievable moving ahead. Therefore, companies must compare the application performance before and after cloud migration, from both business and technical perspectives.