11 Best Practices to Accelerate Your Cloud Migration Journey

Before the COVID-19 pandemic, Moderna decided to create an mRNA cloud platform for research and development. Stephane Bancel, CEO of the company, called this pioneering migration to the public cloud ‘Software for Life’. This migration strategy helped the company improve development and discovery in medicine.

When the pandemic hit, Moderna already had an environment and resources for clinical research. The company provisioned an automated cloud resource for manufacturing processes, online laboratory, and drug-discovery workflows.

A full-scale data-warehousing solution became the key to a streamlined production cycle for Moderna. As a result, the company was able to launch its first phase human trial for the COVID-19 vaccination in 42 days of virus sequencing.

Cloud migration is pivotal to the growth of IT workloads, and it is an indispensable tool necessary to shape future work environments and data access architecture.

Many businesses are experiencing a similar impact of the cloud on their structure. However, to smoothly migrate data and applications to the cloud, businesses need a well-planned, carefully crafted hybrid or public cloud strategy.

When migrating to the cloud, businesses may encounter security problems causing big data breaches and extreme workplace and operational disruption. Using the right approach to cloud migration can minimize challenges.

Challenges Experienced During Cloud Migration

Challenges during cloud migration reduce the operational efficiency of the process structure. It leads to continuous disruption in existing data access and operational activities, hampers the security of data, and creates a gap in IT skills availability.

Some challenges experienced during cloud migration are:

Disruption

Given the current situation, even one hour of downtime can cost around USD 300,000 to the company on average. This Gartner’s report explains that at the lowest end, organizations can experience around USD 1,40,000, which can go up to USD 540,000 in an hour.

Considering the high cost of disruption, cloud migration should be well planned. When applications, data, and desktops are moving to the cloud, proper planning can help reduce disruption and minimize challenges to customers, employees, and other stakeholders. This can also end up reducing disruption costs.

Security

Not more than two years back, over a thousand million data records were breached. It is necessary to understand that during cloud migration, the organizational structure is vulnerable, which means data breach is highly likely.

Businesses create a passage to host data on the cloud, which offers an easy entry and exit point to potential hackers. Securing data and records at the time of cloud migration is crucial for organizations. Hence, devising a careful strategy that secures your data and ensures compliance with regulations is imperative.

Costing

With a cloud migration strategy for the public cloud, organizations can easily spend more on the process than expected. One of the reasons to shift to the cloud is cost optimization, and cloud service providers or consulting partners may advise around a 30-40% reduction in spending on infrastructural costs. However, it is easy to overspend during migration, and many organizations end up spending, or wasting, 32% of the budget.

Gaps

Your organization has IT professionals who understand the current infrastructure. They are equipped to manage the activities of the current infrastructure. However, when you move to the cloud, these IT professionals may not have the skills to manage the cloud security or infrastructure, which often ends up creating a huge skills gap.

Things to Keep in Mind Pre-Migration

Some best practices help you ensure smooth cloud migration. Here’s a list of 11 pre and post-cloud migration strategies.

A Migration Map

Before starting cloud migration, it is best to map your migration strategy. You need to create a map stating business objectives and different use cases of cloud migration.

For example, use the pilot light migration strategy for the cloud, where businesses first test migration of light-weight aspects to the cloud, gain confidence in the process and then shift critical aspects. This means that you can draw a map of sending less critical workloads to the cloud first. After a few micro-goal migrations, assess the effectiveness and ensure an advanced experience. Once you are satisfied, prepare for the larger migration.

A Governance Model

Since security and compliance is an imperative concern amongst organizations, the cloud governance framework helps set clear policies and internal standards.

Cloud governance is similar to the IT governance model of the workplace, it is, in fact, a part of IT governance. You can assess inherent risks of data access and third-party services to create policy-based workflows for tools, software, etc. Doing so helps organizations minimize risks and receive optimum value.

Having clear cloud governance guidelines also helps you streamline roles, structures, responsibilities, objectives, measures, principles, and frameworks.

Optimize IT Asset Migration

Before cloud migration, businesses should create a list of IT assets that they own, ones that can be migrated and ones that can’t. This activity helps quantify the level of success you can achieve during cloud migration.

In this phase, businesses have an opportunity to explore valuable discovery tools, such as AWS Application Discovery Service. These tools help smoothen the migration curve and reduce the risk of wrong dependency identification.

Start Training Staff

It is likely that your team is not equipped to aid functions of cloud migration. You may have an expert team, but the cloud is a crucial landscape. The more your team studies the cloud, the more they are equipped to break barriers, eliminate risks, and support organizational change. Remember that change management triggered by technology (Read: Cloud Migration) starts with your IT team. Hence, start training program there.

Things to Keep in Mind During Migration

The above activities help you prepare for the actual process of migration. Here are some things to keep in mind during cloud migration:

Automate

Disruptions and downtimes are common at the time of cloud migration. However, a smart strategy involves automating migration patterns that reoccur. This will help you smoothen the migration curve, improve the speed of the process, and reduce the costs associated with it.

Many tools are also available in the market to help you migrate. However, the cloud provider, consulting team, and your IT team should be able to support these tools and use them in the right way. The goal is to automate repeated patterns, ensure migration efficiency, and reduce risks and rates.

Handle Software Licenses

The biggest concern during migration to the cloud is a software license. Will your software license work on the cloud?

Most businesses already have on-premise licenses, and the good thing is that many cloud providers also allow ‘Bring Your Own License’. This way you can take your license to the cloud and enjoy your current software.

However, this is not as easy as it sounds. Often there are rules and regulations for applications and software migration to the cloud. Hence, at the time of migration, create a list and understand licensing forms in relevance to the cloud. This may involve negotiation or communication with the vendor to check if you can somehow upgrade current tools and apps to use on the cloud.

Here, Software Asset Management proves beneficial in eliminating costs and risks of license management.  

Keep It Simple

An important goal during the migration is to make your staff comfortable with the procedure. Therefore, it is necessary to achieve simpler tasks first. This will allow company stakeholders, involving employees, to observe quick wins and develop trust in the process. Once you are able to build a cloud vision internally, your entire team starts supporting the migration process.

Things to Keep in Mind Post-Migration

Once you have migrated to the cloud successfully, there are some post-migration validation activities:

Validate and Verify

The significance of testing throughout the cloud adoption process is indispensable. Similar to how we would operate in an agile environment, it is best to continuously test and remediate challenges. Always understand alternate scenarios, find how application dependencies affect the entire migration, and catch a bird’s eye view of the process.

It is also possible to suffer from analysis paralysis, where overanalyzing the situation leads to a roadblock. You no longer understand what is right or wrong. In this case, taking cloud consulting or support from a provider is the right course of action.

Maintain Everything

Once you have migrated to the cloud, you need to maintain your new environment. Without regular robust maintenance, the environment may fail to offer you smooth functioning over time.

Regularly check updates, ensure hardware and software upgrades, and use practices that help build resilience in the cloud architecture.

Ensure DRP

The best strategies and architectures also need disaster recovery, so your cloud migration needs a fail-safe, backup plan. To deal with unknown situations, create a DRP, which means securing and backing up your cloud data in a redundant manner. This will allow you to create a foolproof cloud ecosystem powered by regular backups and assurance of business continuity.

Bonus Tip: Over Communicate

The last tip on the list is to over-communicate. While both over-communication and under-communication are observed as bad decisions, it is not one in the case of migration. You should document processes, alert teams when in confusion, and involve your entire business in this important decision. Knowing when there will be disruption, how traffic will be diverted, and how much expected time we need to operate the new structure is imperative for your business stakeholders.

Key Takeaways

To remain competitive in a crucial environment consistently experiencing disruption, businesses need to migrate to the cloud. The cloud offers a smooth, resilient, and robust manner to operate in a driven landscape that dynamically evolves and improves. To ensure business profitability, implementing the cloud in the right manner is significant. Revisit the above steps, carefully prepare your cloud migration plan, and then make data-driven decisions.

For challenges faced during cloud migration, Innominds can help ensure scalability, simplicity, and speed. Our cloud engineering service offerings help you control costs, create a flexible infrastructure, and improve operational efficiency. From designing cloud-native apps to enabling SaaS, Innominds helps craft a value-generating cloud migration strategy.

Check out how we helped our supply chain client reduce cloud migration costs. Our client is the leading supply chain provider in the pharmaceutical and manufacturing industry. They wanted to move infrastructure from AWS to Azure cloud for better uptimes and efficiency, and Innominds helped them achieve a 20% improvement in development productivity.