Tips for a Successful Migration to the Cloud

Everyone’s moving to the cloud – but without a proper plan in place, you could be asking for issues.

If your business is debating whether moving to the cloud will be beneficial, it’s important to investigate all your options. There’s little denying that cloud storage is the wave of the future (and the here and now), with a recent State of the Cloud Survey from RightScale showing that 95% of the IT professionals surveyed were using various cloud solutions.

While moving critical data and solutions off-site, proper steps must be taken to ensure a smooth transition. A cloud migration strategy that isn’t planned well in advance can lead to major issues, including a lack of buy-in from employees across all levels of your company

Follow these four steps to ensure that your next cloud migration is successful:

1. A secure migration path is critical to success

When you’re looking to transfer potentially sensitive data from on-premise hardware to the cloud, it’s critical that you make sure your connection is properly secure and encrypted. Data should always be encrypted while in transit as well as at rest. The last thing you want is to have all of your information compromised while trying to migrate to an off-site cloud provider.

2. Lay out a realistic cloud migration plan

A sophisticated migration plan that outlines the order of events, as well as a realistic timeline will be essential for success. This plan will help all thought leaders within your organization, regardless of their level, understand the progress of the migration.

And should any issues arise during the process, it’s important to notify all affected parties to maintain transparency.

3. Ensure the cloud environment you choose is able to handle the needs of your organization

This may sound obvious, but before beginning a cloud migration, make sure that the vendor you choose is able to properly host your data and applications. Occasionally, virtual servers will be provisioned without sufficient hardware specs, which can lead to a botched migration. Discuss your specific needs with prospective cloud providers, and ensure that your IT staff is aware of the exact hardware specifications that will be provided to your organization in the cloud.

4. Check that everything was migrated correctly before determining the move was a success

Do you have a checklist to follow after the migration is complete to ensure that the entire exercise was a success? If not, how can you really sign off that the migration is complete? Have a checklist of edge case scenarios to verify that the cloud solution that you’ve invested in can handle all aspects of your organization’s data needs.

Without performing this check, it could be weeks before you or your IT team realize that certain data or applications that may rarely be used were properly transferred.

Extra step: Entrust your cloud migration to the experts at MessageOps

Migrating critical data and applications to the cloud is no small undertaking, and as such, should be done with the utmost care. If you’re unsure of how to lay out a migration plan that will not hinder the growth of your organization, feel free to reach out to the cloud experts at MessageOps today. We’ve worked with organizations of all sizes on successful cloud migrations, and we are well-versed in many of the common issues that arise during this complicated process.