Best Practices… Taking it Step-by-Step to Your Smooth, Resilient Cloud Migration

With more companies moving to the cloud to support remote work requirements, due diligence is essential. Moving to the cloud is a major undertaking, but it has to happen. There’s not only a pandemic to deal with, but legacy systems are expensive to maintain. To ensure your cloud migration is smooth and resilient keep these three principles in mind…

1. Plan for Now, Plan for the Future

Doing your homework pays off in the long run. First, identify all the relevant stakeholders – those who will be most impacted by changes in applications and accessibility – and discover what’s most important to them. What are their key workflows? What applications and tools are essential for them to do their work? What’s most likely to be impacted by the migration? After completing this process, you will be better able to develop a detailed deployment plan that takes each stakeholder’s unique needs into account.

Next, decide what will go to the cloud. Examine each application and determine if it makes more sense to migrate it, keep it local, or upgrade it to a native cloud application or Software-as-a-Service (SaaS) application. Evaluate how each decision will impact your overall infrastructure. The discovery and evaluation process may also help you to project future needs.

2. Actively Manage Change

When designing your cloud migration, identify each significant moving part that could create problems, and develop a plan to mitigate the issues.

When you shift applications to the cloud, will you have the IT personnel with the skill set you need? If not, you might have to hire new team members or retrain current employees. Workflows will change. Responsibilities and roles may change. Think ahead and assemble the players you need. Consider forming a dedicated team just to manage the migration.

3. Test for Resilience before Migration

Because resilience is so crucial to the business, it pays to prepare and test your systems before deployment…

Ask your vendors for demonstrations before you go live. They should be able to walk you through every step in the process.

Because there will be bumps along the way, make sure you’ll have access to real-time data in case you want to step back and change your plan.

Preparing for cloud migration is a good time to reevaluate your back-up and recovery solutions to make sure they’re strong and aligned with the company’s business strategy.

Moving your communications to the cloud shouldn’t be intimidating. With a strong partner like TCI on your side, you and your stakeholders can rest assured that the migration will go smoothly. Contact us today at (703) 321-3030 or info@tcicomm.com.

 

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