The cloud is quickly becoming a requirement for businesses across the globe. It was recently discovered in an independent survey of IT leaders in twenty-four different countries that digital solutions drive 47% of revenue. These digital solutions include customer facing applications as well as back-office functionality.
The opportunities that the cloud offers to your organization are many, so how do you successfully migrate to the cloud? Here are our five strategies to a successful cloud migration.
Strategy One: Simplify Architecture
The simpler the architecture, the greater the chance of a successful cloud migration. Perform a test migration with your cloud partner so that you both can identify and remedy differences in environments. It is important to perform these tests to prove that your cloud partner can indeed support your requirements.
Strategy Two: Use Live Migration Approaches
Does data gravity get in the way of performing a test migration? Data gravity refers to the difficulty to truly test an application as it requires the data to be transferred prior to the application. A live migration strategy streams the whole instance at once, and allows synchronization between complex systems that avoids this consistency issue.
Strategy Three: Ensure Security Measures Are In Place for Production Data
Understanding and implementing necessary security protocols in your cloud migration is important to your success. The public cloud is not the best option for databases that require consistent monitoring or transactional production servers. The common concern with production data that is constantly tracked and synchronized to the cloud is that it may be accessed via the public cloud. Placing production data in a private cloud that offers high availability and security standards is necessary to your success.
Strategy Four: Fast & Simple Data-Rich Application Migration
For applications that are data-rich and heavily relied upon by your IT team, a detailed plan must be created and your cloud provider must offer a fast and simple migration for a smooth transition. If using a multi-cloud solution to ensure portability and interoperability of stateless applications, you will want to make use of containers.
Strategy Five: Adapt to Architectural Differences
While the Crossroads Cloud will adapt its architecture to fit exactly your needs, many cloud providers do not provide this. You may have to make modifications to your application design and current architecture as they may not follow the current cloud standards. To prevent disaster, perform a piece-by-piece evaluation and then move only the most pertinent features.
Ultimately the secret to a successful cloud migration is choosing a cloud partner that fits your needs. Take inventory of your current architecture and your desired outcome, and then make your choice. The cloud provider should scale to your requirements, manage fluctuations, and support migration of key applications simply and without compromising data.
Crossroads Technologies provides HIPAA compliant cloud solutions that can be customized according to your needs. Schedule a consultation today to begin planning your cloud migration.