Here are four steps that will help you successfully migrate to the cloud:
1. Planning
Before migrating to the cloud, it is essential to determine the reasons for the migration. Will the cloud be used only for disaster recovery? DevOps? Hosting enterprise workloads?
At this stage, you must assess your environment and determine what factors will govern the migration, like critical application data, legacy data, and application interoperability. In migrating data to the cloud, you must consider your reliance on that data. Do you need to resync it frequently? Are there compliance regulations? Can non-critical data be migrated quickly?
By identifying these requirements, you can plan the tools you'll need during migration, identify which data needs to be migrated and when, determine what kind of destination volumes to use, and decide whether the data will need encryption at rest during transit.
You must also consider the time and capital investment in training employees as part of your cloud migration strategy. Because cloud migration involves constant updates, training cannot be a one-time event.
2. Developing a Business Case
Once you've established your plan, you should research cloud service providers and other partners and their pricing.
- Analyze the expected benefits of cloud migration across three dimensions: operational benefits, cost savings, and architectural improvements.
- Develop a business case for each application you plan to migrate to the cloud, comparing the expected total cost of ownership (TCO) on the cloud to the current TCO.
- Use a cloud cost calculator, considering storage requirements, computing resources, operating systems, and specific performance and networking requirements.
- Identify cost-saving options for your proposed cloud deployment by working with cloud providers.
Multiple pricing models are available, and providers typically offer deep discounts when you commit to a certain amount of cloud spending or reserve instances for a long time. To understand the long-term cost of your cloud migration, you should factor these discounts into your business plan.
