Preparing To Adopt The Cloud: A Step-by-Step Cloud Migration Checklist

Today many businesses are moving their IT to the cloud as they want to move away from hardware lifecycle management and limited flexibility.

Switching your business’s current IT infrastructure from on-premises to the cloud is no kid’s play. To migrate your business to the cloud, follow this ten-step cloud migration assessment checklist for foolproof cloud migration.

Understand the Goals and Objectives

Understanding the current state of your business and how it can benefit from migrating to the cloud is a critical step in a cloud migration assessment checklist. To ensure this, prepare a list of all the objectives and goals you are trying to achieve from this migration. These can boost operations’ speed and ensure better scalability and access to resources, digital transformation, financial savings, business agility, and customer service.

Identify and Involve Key Stakeholders

Getting approval from key stakeholders is essential to ensuring your cloud migration and ongoing cloud usage go as planned and generate a positive investment return. Begin by having discussions with the key stakeholders to understand how they currently use their IT and learn about their goals and future objectives.

Explain the benefits of being in the cloud and manage expectations by flagging that there may be some bumps along the way. When you get your key stakeholders onboarded, you can better identify and define key problem areas and workflows that belong in the cloud.

Ease Internal IT Workloads with a Cloud Migration Partner

Most organizations opt for external support to help manage their cloud migration. For this, you need to select a partner who takes the time to understand your business’s migration goals and your desired outcome. A good cloud migration partner must be an extension of your internal team, who would complement the in-house capabilities by offering a tailored solution.

While selecting the migration partner, find out about their experience, cloud migration capabilities, and if they’ve worked in a similar industry. Start by talking to some of their reference customers and understand their experiences.

Assess Workflow Readiness

Your business can take several different migration strategiesfor cloud migration. Assessment of workflow readiness will help your business identify the workflows you should host in the cloud. It will assist you in determining the workflows that need an additional level of development or internal process refinement to move to the cloud. To ensure you catch all cloud-ready applications, work systematically, department to department, and workflow to workflow.

Organize Data for Migration

It is essential to plan for data migration as it is one crucial step in the cloud migration. You must take the time to analyze, review, and cleanse the existing data. Take this opportunity to discard data that is no longer required or relevant and then plan for data migration in a phased manner. First, migrate the data that is extremely critical and then proceed with migrating the not-so-critical data.

Define Costs to Establish ROI and Long-Term Spend

Even though cloud computing has a reputation for going over budget, you can avoid cloud overspending entirely with the right people and cost analysis. You will receive a clear overview of costs when outsourcing your migration and IT support from the beginning. Your migration partner will identify your initial and ongoing expenses and assist you in connecting the dots between technical requirements and business.

Therefore, you will be able to build a transparent financial overview. This final commercial cost analysis will set budget goals for you to work toward and allow you to readjust your cloud migration strategy if budgets don’t align.

Build a Continuity Plan for Trouble

Building a business continuity plan for cloud migration and ongoing hosting is critical to ensure your business doesn’t come to a grinding halt and your data remains protected. It will be your business’s safety net should you encounter a worst-case scenario. A continuity plan should be considered essential when migrating business processes to the cloud.

Build, Test, and Optimize the Components

Establishing a parallel test environment when migrating to the cloud is essential. It will ensure that your environment is aligned with your migration strategy and your business’s cloud goals and that the infrastructure works as intended.

Take time to test against your continuity plan to ensure any red flags are fixed before you go live. It’s essential from an internal reputation point of view. First impressions count, and you want users to have a positive first experience when introducing something new.

Retire Your Legacy System to Avoid Added Costs

Decommissioning your legacy environment can achieve cost savings, increase security, consolidate your data management, and enhance control. Utilize your outsourced IT partnership to ensure legacy decommissioning is done correctly so it won’t cost you down the line.

Monitor and Optimize for Ongoing Success

You must keep your platform by regularly monitoring, updating, and optimizing your system. When migrating to the cloud, your business is more agile in response to technological change.

Bottom Line

You can get the scalability, flexibility, and adaptability you need from the cloud. Following the above checklist, you can leverage the most from the cloud for your migration and ongoing cloud maintenance. It is the perfect solution for businesses looking to get to the cloud and make the most of its offers.