When a business migrates to the cloud, it must understand its benefits and risks. Having the right expertise in place is essential for a successful migration.
Whether you need to train your team on the new technology or hire an MSP, you must choose the right skills for the job. Otherwise, you risk losing critical data that can cripple your business.
Cost
Companies need to be realistic about the cost of migrating to the cloud. However, a comprehensive analysis can identify maintenance costs, equipment, and IT staff time savings. The ability to scale resources on demand reduces overall IT costs as well.
Companies should also consider the risk of cloud vendor lock-in. This can be disastrous if the company’s critical applications depend on an infrastructure service that is not resilient to a sudden provider shutdown.
Companies that want to maximize the efficiency of their cloud migration should focus on data quality and governance. This will reduce preparation work for the migration and help ensure that a new application is ready to use as soon as it’s migrated. Then, IT teams can focus on addressing other concerns, like performance and stability.
Scalability
One of the biggest benefits of cloud migration is that it allows a business to scale quickly without worrying about capacity issues. During peak times, like Black Friday sales, a company can easily add more computing resources to handle the load.
Planning and hiring Microsoft Cloud Migration Services that consider the business’s scalability needs is important. It’s also important to review the current infrastructure and identify any applications requiring reworking to make them compatible with the cloud.
Some workloads may have features that can’t be migrated to the cloud, and retaining them might increase IT costs. Planning and establishing performance, cost, and timeframe goals is a good way to minimize costs. This will help ensure a successful and efficient migration.
Security
Security measures are a vital part of any cloud migration project. This is especially true for large cloud environments that offer a variety of storage and processing services. With the right security measures, data may be protected during migration.
In addition, a lack of staff training can result in security gaps during the migration process. Managing apps in the cloud is very different from working with local data centers and routine virtualized resources, so it’s important to train your staff before moving.
Another way to avoid security risks during a cloud migration is to take stock of your current environment and prioritize which data and applications to migrate first. Migrating unnecessary data can cost more than you think in the long run, and it’s often best to refactor apps instead of just lift-and-shifting them to the cloud.
Flexibility
Migrating a workload to the cloud is not a one-size-fits-all project. Each organization must evaluate the application and its data to determine what changes must be made to function in the cloud. This will require extensive planning and the assistance of a qualified engineering team.
For example, some applications may need to be bigger to migrate over the Internet. This requires offline migration, which involves loading the data onto an appliance and physically shipping it to a cloud provider.
“lift and shift” is a great option for organizations new to the cloud or looking to save on infrastructure costs. However, applications will need to be reworked and optimized for the cloud once they are in place, which can be expensive and time-consuming.
Collaboration
Cloud migration frees an organization from requiring on-premises infrastructure, saving up-front capital expenses and maintenance costs. It also allows an organization to shift from a CapEx model (where hardware is purchased up-front and depreciated over time) to an OpEx model, where virtual hardware infrastructure is billed monthly based on metered usage.
However, this new model can create challenges for IT and developers. They may need to learn to work with a different environment and adapt to the nuances of managing applications in the cloud. Upfront cloud skill-building and training can help prepare teams for this transition. Some legacy applications won’t move easily to the cloud, and it’s important to decide what will stay, what will be rebuilt, or what might need to be repurposed entirely. These decisions must be made with business goals, especially considering potential legal restrictions and compliance considerations.