Ensure you are fully ready before migrating your application to the cloud, which has gained plenty of importance post-pandemic
The cloud phenomenon has fundamentally altered how businesses communicate and perform. It is estimated, by 2025, the global cloud computing market will be worth $832 billion.
Cloud communications have evolved with technologies like Voice over Internet Protocol (VoIP), hosted PBX, and UCaaS. Cloud platforms have become very popular for streamlining operations to empower the remote workforce.
Cloud hosting services enable companies to outsource systems management duties like provisioning, data storage, and security to their providers. It is done through their own data centers and servers. Customers can also access these systems through the cloud, paying for only their services.
With the technology garnering more importance in the pandemic era, where remote working saw exponential growth, it has become important for companies to migrate to the cloud. A company must assess what applications and data it wants to be transferred to a cloud platform for this to happen.
The assessment involves measures to migrate the data while considering the impact on business operations and the minimal effort needed to move the applications. It also revolves around calculating your cloud readiness – how ready your applications are to be transferred to the platform.
Here is a checklist that can help you be accurate with your process.
Identify the scope for migration
A firm should be assured of its reason for migration and must understand to what extent this transfer is needed. Not all applications can be moved to the cloud with ease. For instance, security and privacy components can be tedious as a company will have to understand where the data is stored and how accessible it is.
A crucial element of readiness assessment is to evaluate your technical and legacy debt. If the code is old and not updated, problems may arise while moving it to the cloud. Even a legacy app risks becoming unstable owing to compatibility issues with current operating systems and IT infrastructure. In such a scenario, you could check with your in-house experts or cloud migration service providers if your legacy application can be migrated to the cloud or if the code should be rewritten before the process.
Evaluate in-house resources
Before migrating, a company can assess resources like available funds and if the IT teams have the right skillset and time to focus on the task. If the team’s knowledge base is weak in certain areas, the company must educate them. While peers may be familiar with the IT environment, the company may need to hire migration experts to bridge the knowledge gaps. This could add additional costs to the process.
Assess infrastructure requirements
A company may need to research its IT environment to choose what applications and data could be moved to the cloud, what could stay in the internal data center, and what could be erased. This sifting can help an organization know its requirements for its future cloud environment.
How applications will migrate is important when performing a cloud readiness assessment. The applications will need to be altered according to the new architecture. The approaches to this dilemma can range from making minor changes to the application to completely rebuilding it or using a software-as-a-service (SaaS) application.
Also, storage size will affect your cloud expenditure, so ensure you pay for what you need according to the magnitude.
What are the security requirements?
Data can be secured through encryption, identity, access management, and web application firewalls. However, security measures will primarily influence the government’s stance. As a measure of precaution, companies must take stock of their data. They must also know their security needs.
For instance, Facebook-owned WhatsApp often says that its messages are end-to-end encrypted. However, this comes with a disclaimer – WhatsApp says it does not retain data for law enforcement purposes unless they receive a “valid preservation request before a user has deleted that content” from its servers.
Determine timeline and budget
Mapping out steps and making a timeline for milestones is important in the assessment process. It will help a company keep track of progress and perhaps highlight the setbacks. Timelines can also help keep budgets in check if the organization maps how much is spent on every component. Also, budgets must follow the business cases for migrating. This includes the total cost of ownership calculations, the labor involved in migration, licensing costs, and migration training.
Choose the right cloud
Ensure that the cloud services you adopt suit your data and security needs. There are SaaS, IaaS, and PaaS platforms; then there are the hybrid, private, public, and multi-cloud ones. While choosing from these options, you must see if it is compatible with your current system.
Then, you will have to choose the right vendor. Several of these providers offer services of their own and aid companies in completing the assessment.
For instance, AWS has the Cloud Adoption Readiness Tool that questions a company’s familiarity with migration and then reports on readiness.
Likewise, Google Cloud has its Technical Account Management teams, and IBM has IBM Cloud Migration Services that connect organizations to experts.
Also, when you review the right providers, you can test upload and download times for files, as these speeds are integral to performance and usage. You could also look at how each provider’s security stacks up, how responsive their customer service teams are when there’s a problem, at pricing, and any additional features offered.
Conclusion
Cloud readiness assessment helps understand your existing IT infrastructure and the potential pitfalls of migration. But, it also enables you to meticulously plan the subsequent steps to make the migration process successful.
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