Comprehensive Cloud Migration Strategy & Best Practices to Make Sure You Do It Right

Summary: Dealing with cloud migration lately? We have compiled a list of best practices in migrating data to the cloud that you must follow for an uninterrupted migration process. Moreover, you will also get a complete strategy that will help you in safe data shifting.

Without any further discussion let’s directly get into it.

An Overview of Cloud Migration Needs

When the COVID -19 pandemic hit the IT industry, it has changed the working scenarios for almost every business today. Organizations, that were completely relying on physical servers or on-premise servers, did not get a proper solution during the work-from-home conditions.

Moreover, in an attempt of holding work productivity, organizations had to migrate to cloud-based solutions such as Office 365, Google Workspace, and many more.

Are You Still Wondering about the Sudden Increase in the Demand of Cloud Migration?

According to a recent survey and industry projections alone, it was found out that about 60 percent of enterprise workloads will be running on cloud platforms by 2024.

This sudden increase in the number of enterprises and business organizations, that are leaning towards the migration of some of their IT workloads to the cloud platform is not just a smart choice, but also crucial for their IT strategies & work efficiency.

Associated Benefits of Migrating Database to Cloud Platforms

• Cost-Effective: Subscription-based cloud services result in significant cost savings, without the initial capital investment that on-premise infrastructure & resources require.
• Enterprise Digitalization: Cloud platforms allow businesses to freely modify and optimize their enterprise data and organizational activities by leveraging a combination of digital technologies.
• Increased Productivity & Revenue: The cloud offloads some of the most time-consuming aspects of managing your IT infrastructure and resources to a service provider, allowing your enterprise to focus on adding more value, innovation, and thriving revenue.
• Hyper Scalability: The major benefit of using a cloud platform is, that it allows you to hyper-scale, provision, de-provision the infrastructure/resources as needed for specific projects or situations.

Major Challenges While Migrating to Cloud Platform

Despite the multiple advantages of moving to cloud platforms, there are several associated challenges as well, that you should consider before moving forward. The following are some of the major issues:

• Downtime Management: One of the major challenges that organizations face while moving to the cloud is business downtime. Often times they cite a single hour of downtime can cost millions of dollars. Therefore, it becomes the need of the hour to migrate in such a way that disruption of businesses can be minimized.
• Security and Compliance: Nowadays, we see numerous highlights of major data breaches, cyber-attacks, etc. Hence, the enterprises must ensure not only that the data they migrate to the cloud is secure, but also that they remain compliant with relevant regulations in shifting to the cloud.
• Inadequate Technical Skills: There is always a technical skill gap in terms of personnel capable within the employees and IT staff of securing cloud environments and making sure that cloud migrations go as smoothly as possible. It’s not enough to have people who understand IT security as, cloud security requires technical knowledge of the major platforms and their nuances, such as Office 365, Google Workplace, etc.

Therefore, we have created a comprehensive guide to follow!

Here is the list of Best Practices in Migrating Data to the Cloud Safely

• Create a Migration Strategy: It is always a best practice to follow while performing this operation, is to create a proper migration strategy. That includes various aspects of offering such as rehost on infrastructure as a service (IaaS), refactor for the platform as a service (PaaS), revise for IaaS or PaaS, rebuild on PaaS, or replace with software as a service (SaaS) from the industry-leading service providers. Moreover, you have to analyze your business motives and usage for shifting to the cloud.

• Analyze Cloud Governance Framework: By analyzing the cloud governance framework, you can get insights into control and management points in cloud operations. It also takes into account the inherent risks of trusting data and apps to third-party services. Proper cloud governance includes assets of things like structures, roles, responsibilities, guidelines, plans, goals, regulations, standards, & a decision framework. In this way, it ensures that the enterprise migrating to the cloud can easily accomplish the task without any risk and with maximum value.
  
  
• Optimize the Network: Before getting into the cloud migration process you must ensure a fast secure and reliable network connection to avoid any midway trouble. As it might require a gigabit-speed to move to the cloud encompasses users transitioning from accessing data or apps locally. If a dedicated network connection is not required, still it is always a best practice to seek a better, and faster network connection in migrating data to the cloud.
  
  
• Train Staff Early: As oftentimes, businesses quote a shortage of cloud expertise or a cloud skills gap as a hurdle to the migration process. Therefore it is always a best practice to train the required IT staff as soon as possible. As shifting to completely new working platforms can adversely affect the work productively, hence it is a wise step to assign a series of training sessions for employees as well.
  
  
• Automate Where Possible: Now, when it comes to the migration part, there is no reliable manual way to perform this complex task. Moreover, in this process, the organizational data comes in migration.  Therefore, they must ensure the most reliable way to execute the same to avoid any crucial data loss. It is suggested to use the Top Rated & Secure Cloud to Cloud Migration Tool. There are several smart features that come with this utility, some of them are mentioned below.

Free Download Purchase Now

Advanced Features of Software to Ensure Smooth Data Migration to Cloud

• Allow migration of emails, documents, contacts, calendars of all user accounts.
• Offers Category & Date filter for selective data migration.
• Comes with a mapping option for source & destination cloud user id mapping.
• Exports detailed & summary reports for all users whose been migrated.
• Works without any data size limitation or restriction. 
• Offers migrating data to cloud at a speed of 40 GB/hr
• Various Re-Run options for migration of skipped, failed & newly migrated data.

Final Verdict

While migrating to the cloud, organizations face various challenges and complexities. Knowing them and making a best practice before the data migration is crucial and can also save a lot of time and money. 

Hence, in this article, we have covered all the challenges that organizations might face in this process. And also provided the best practices in migrating data to the cloud.

Also Read: How to Effortlessly Transfer Data From Cloud to Cloud?