posted 10 months ago
Things to consider when migrating from on-premises to Cloud
Even if it sounds great in theory migrating a company’s IT systems from on-site to cloud, while not disrupting the usual business cycle, has its challenges.
Many companies believe that investing in cloud systems, as opposed to on-site hardware will result in less applications that need to be managed, but this does not equate to less work for their IT teams.
Cloud computing is highly dependent on overseeing the processes as to ensure that suppliers are meeting their agreements and adhering to a strict budget. One of the most important things to know is that the staff needs to be upskilled and re-trained in order to manage their new evolved roles.
Creating a robust migration process, along with the work required on training the staff are vital to the success of this endeavour but so are the next few steps:
1. Preparation
The global cloud market has seen an overwhelming increase in the past few years and today you’ll hear that most experts make a strong case about cloud adoption. However, moving all your IT systems to cloud, although appealing, is not entirely correct. Not all of the systems must be moved since you need to consider both the magnitude of the migration and the impact this has on the business and its staff.
Before doing this, you need to understand the unique needs of your business, which are key in creating a plan for the migration without compromising the effectiveness of the business, its staff and all the while maintaining the budget you had in mind.
Most of the applications used by companies that have been in business for decades are not optimised for virtual environments and regardless of how well thought out and ambitious your strategy is most of the important data and applications will need to remain under your tutelage.
2. Planning
Planning your short, mid and long-term goals would be of the utmost importance. While, on the long run you know that you want all of your applications and data storage to be moved to the cloud, in short/mid-terms you need to consider how you will maintain the accessibility of the systems without hindering the daily activities of the business.
Maintaining legacy systems and hardware during the transition to cloud can be outsourced to diminish the potential disruptions.
On the same note, while migrating to cloud, you need to understand that some hardware will be retired. It is however paramount to ensure all the stored data is secured in order to avoid data breaches. Software management methods, generally, do not provide adequate protection.
2. Budget management
When budgets are being transferred from on-site to cloud systems, usually, IT managers have a lot less wiggle room for their own infrastructure. The Financial pressure adds up and, as such, finding ways to improve cost efficiency is a vital process in your business’ data centre maintenance.
3. Post project costs
Post cloud migration, older IT systems will become, in time, deprecated. IT managers need to acknowledge this fact and understand if outsourcing the maintenance of these systems to a third party provider is favorable for the business.
While third party providers seem like a costly addition, they can aid with their services, for, usually a lower cost than internal resources and, as a result, it would help internal teams as they can spend their time working on the new cloud infrastructure and still have support for older systems that are running on-premises.
Planning might not solve all the issues that arise but it will provide a consistency regarding the operational costs and aid the IT teams in managing their data storage with ease.