How to Bring Your Cloud Migration Strategy to Life Successfully

Reduced cost of ownership, rapid expansion to new markets, up to 50% faster product deployments and accelerated innovation — the cloud is transforming business operations across multiple industries.

The question is — do you see the silver lining in the cloud?

But failure will not be your case. In this post, we help you shape the initial framework for your cloud migration strategy using a simple 5-step approach.

A clear set of business objectives is the backbone of a successful cloud migration strategy.

IaaS companies can offer competitive pricing as they are leveraging discounts from hardware vendors for bulk purchases; leverage open source technologies and carefully optimize data provisioning. That’s why the initial cloud pricing may be much lower compared to what you are paying to maintain an internal data center.

The elasticity of the cloud enables you to pay as you go and up-scale/down-scale at any time, meaning you will never again pay for unused resources.

Moving enterprise applications to the cloud gives you the ability to reach new geographies and new markets without investing heavily in IT infrastructure locally. Your legacy desktop products could be revamped as SaaS applications and delivered to users at any location.

Public cloud security may have earned negative media coverage, but the truth is — cloud applications can boast the same or higher SLA levels when compared to traditional data centers. Specifically, think about the following benefits:

The cloud could be used as a DR location for both on-prem. and virtual applications. This is a cost-efficient option for warm DR scenarios as you will only pay for storage that is in use.

Public, private and hybrid cloud — what should it be?

So should your enterprise cloud strategy follow this lead? The benefits certainly are attractive:

Considering that all your assets are distributed among different vendors, switching to another PaaS or IaaS provider will be simpler. You will also future-proof your business if one of the providers suddenly decided to go out of business.

If you have already researched different cloud vendors, you know that each one has its strengths and draws. A multi-cloud strategy allows you to grab the best features from each vendor and align them with your business needs. Similarly, if you need to allocate additional resources for a certain process (e.g. automated testing for the new product features), you can add a supplementary cloud to ensure higher resiliency.

You can store sensitive information in a distributed fashion to ensure you are meeting all the governmental compliances (e.g. related to storing private customer data); regulations of your company and those of a cloud provider itself.

Each vendor has different pricing models. By conducting a performance analysis of your current workloads (cloud and on-prem.), you can project the TCO and workload performance in each cloud and identify the most beneficial combinations in terms of cost/value. Don’t forget that an existing data center can be turned into a private cloud too.

Choosing to use cloud vendors in different regions can help you ensure that your applications will always be up and running despite the local outages in a certain data center/cloud provider.

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