Competing in today's digital environment and meeting high customer requirements demand organizations to digitalize their current process to improve their efficiency. This encourages cloud transformation as an effective solution to enhance operations with better scalability, and lower costs. 70 percent of the businesses surveyed in Europe saw increasing cloud migration of workloads as their top cloud initiative (Flexera, 2021). Despite this, cloud migration is not a simple task, dealing only with complex legacy architecture. Downtime, cloud security, and other serious repercussions might result from the lack of a comprehensive cloud strategy.
The importance of a comprehensive cloud strategy before migration
During cloud migration, an organization transfers its resources and workloads to a cloud computing environment, often to operate on the cloud platform supplied by a cloud service provider like AWS, Google Cloud, or Azure.
Moving to the cloud is more than simply a technological shift; it is also a culture shift that affects the whole organization. Workflows are also being moved to the cloud from on-premise, impacting how businesses operate with their data and systems. With a well-considered strategy in place, organizations will get the most out of their cloud initiatives in a shorter time and even minimize cloud-based security risks.
On the other hand, leadership teams with the IT team have to prepare a well-defined transition plan for the on-premise resources to a cloud platform. A concise migration plan in place can also boost cooperation across teams and departments for a successful cloud adoption.
To achieve a comprehensive strategy for a successful cloud migration, be mindful of the following key components:
1. Prioritize Cloud Security
With the implementation of well-prepared cloud security policies, adequate protection measures for cloud-based sensitive data and applications will be ensured by adapting to the evolving threats and regulatory requirements. The following are the most important security factors to take into account:
- Regulatory compliance: When transitioning to the cloud, verify compliance with all laws and regulations. While supported by all major cloud service vendors in terms of compliance and audit attestations on their capabilities and controls under the shared responsibility mechanism, organizations must also ensure they meet their own privacy responsibilities. For example, specific industries like banking, healthcare, and government sectors may demand particular cloud security management.
- Identity and Access Management: Ensure control access to the cloud resources by adhering to the principle of least privilege and allow just the essential users or services to access critical administrative services.
- Automation for processing resources to the cloud: Automation is one of the best ways to secure cloud-based resources as this repeatable, reliable technique can guarantee consistency and a setup history. Change control can track forthcoming changes. For the successful deployment of this approach, a collaborative effort between the development, security, and operations teams is required.
- Verify data encryption practices: Check the level of encryption being used by the cloud service providers on data processing from when data is transferred through the network from the organizations to the cloud-based database to when data is stored on the cloud.
2. Mind the skills gap
In order to move data and workloads to the cloud, organizations need IT professionals with a variety of skills, including but not limited to:
- Migrating data and applications from one platform to another
- Know-how of cutting-edge technology and highly automated machinery
- Experience in offering migration with minimal risks and downtime.
Lacking IT personnel with the right skills, expertise, and technical know-how can be a barrier for an organization to successfully perform cloud migrations on their own. As a result, many organizations will take a longer time to obtain the benefits from their cloud migration for optimizing their business process.
To accelerate cloud migration initiatives, an effective approach is to employ a reliable cloud service partner with expertise in cloud strategy, migration, and optimization. Ideally, this partner should have established relationships with prominent cloud service providers and have a proven track record of success in the cloud computing industry.
3. Have a strategic vision in place
No matter how much work is put into a cloud migration project, it may be derailed by a lack of a well-defined strategic vision. Organizations may get caught up in the details of implementing new systems and procedures without thinking about how such implementation fit into their overall culture and business goals. Inadequate planning before cloud migration may result in unnecessary costs, resource misallocation, and an unmanageable IT infrastructure.
Crafting a strategic plan should begin with a thorough analysis of the current infrastructure's resources and workflows before laying out a detailed plan for moving to the cloud. Organizations do not have to migrate everything to the cloud at once. It is possible to transfer only one system or application and gaining valuable expertise will be a superior strategy. Adapt the current strategy where necessary along the process.
4. Align business and IT early
Although the decision regarding cloud migration may seem to be the responsibility of the IT team, the business team should get involved as well. They can help to assess the desired advantages of cloud migration, such as operational efficiency, cost savings, and architectural enhancements, and develop a business case for each application that will be moved to the cloud. Therefore, organizations can gain business values from their cloud migration initiatives, supporting new markets and business prospects. Other departments should be also incorporated to make cloud adoption an organization-wide project rather than just involving IT, as it impacts the overall business and operational strategy. Moreover, aligning IT with business objectives will emphasize the critical relevance of IT and digital transformation for their organization-wide success and maximize the returned values from their investment.
To make the most of cloud benefits, organizations can look at outsourcing to experienced IT consulting companies who can help to overcome some adversities in cloud migration. This may lower the risks of low-quality cloud migration project delivery, leading to cost savings and faster time to market. Moreover, by assigning challenging tasks to external specialists or consultancy services, organizations can free up their time to focus on business strategy to spot lucrative opportunities after cloud migration.
Adnoum can help you achieve a successful cloud transformation with strong security, efficiency and scalability in a multi- cloud strategy. Register for a complimentary consultation to learn more about our solutions compatible with your business strategy.
