Migrating to the cloud can have a number of benefits for businesses, including greater flexibility and uptime. It can cost millions to keep core applications in-house, so moving to the cloud also offers potential cost savings. However, cloud migrations can be extremely risky and costly. For many organizations, they can take 3-6 months and cost over $50,000. Cloud migration failure is a possibility, so it's important to understand the risks as well as the potential rewards.
5 Tips for Avoiding Cloud Migration Failure
1. Get executive buy-in
Possibly the most essential step before initiating a cloud migration project is getting executive buy-in. You'll need high-level support to secure the resources and cooperation to overcome cloud migration challenges. Working closely with the business will help them to better understand the challenges of migrating to the cloud. Executives who are far removed from the process may become frustrated with the use of time and resources.
2. Understand business requirements
While understanding the technology is important, it's also essential to understand what end users want to get out of using it. This starts with understanding which applications are currently in use and how people use them. You don't want to waste time migrating and managing applications that nobody uses. It's important to understand which applications are worth migrating, which are best left where they are and which you should scrap altogether.
Fostering collaboration between technology and the business helps to ensure that technology deliveries meet the right business requirements. Give end users visibility of what is being delivered (and why) to improve adoption. You shouldn't just measure the success of a move to the cloud on the migration, but also adoption and benefits compared to on-premise systems.
3. Thoroughly plan and test
Pre- and post-migration testing are extremely important in avoiding cloud migration failure. Tests, migration and implementation plans that outline the steps of the actual data migration in detail allow you to identify potential problems early in the project.
4. Align people and processes with technology
Migrating to the cloud is about more than a simple change in systems. Cloud computing offers different opportunities to an on-premise system and people and processes will need to adapt accordingly. This can often be more difficult than the migration itself but is key to getting the full value out of cloud technology. Moving to the cloud isn't just about saving money on data centers; it creates new capabilities such as the ability to quickly upscale or create new environments. The business may need to update corporate policies to reflect this.
5. Use Cutover
Using Cutover to plan, test and coordinate your cloud migration instead of relying on spreadsheets can increase your chances of success. Unlike spreadsheets, Cutover makes it easy to quickly plan a complex process, notifies everyone involved when their tasks will start, includes built-in comms and allows you to view status in real time.
To find out more about how Cutover can help you avoid cloud migration failure, read our data center migration use case.