Key Cloud Migration Considerations

The business case has been made and you've appointed your project resources for cloud migration. It's now time to scope and plan your migration. Moving your Enterprise IT workloads to the public cloud is a big decision and immediately alters the way you operate your business. It has to be approached strategically and shouldn't to be taken lightly. There are many benefits to cloud IT, but you must carefully deliberate and plan. The wrong decision is going to cost you in more ways than you care to calculate.

Many thoughts must have cluttered your mind such as, which of the cloud service providers best meets your needs? How would you calculate the cost of cloud migration and operation? How can you ensure service continuity during and after the move? What kind of security measures should you take and what do you need to prepare for? How can you ascertain regulatory compliance? There are many more questions that you should answer prior to migrating to the cloud.

In this article, we will discuss few of the most pressing issues to consider when planning the move.

Private, public or hybrid?

One of the first things to decide when migrating to cloud is whether you will go private, public or hybrid.

On a private cloud, you will have a dedicated infrastructure for your business, managed either by your teams or third-party providers. Your organization will have its own dedicated hardware, running on your private network, and located on or off premises.

A public cloud provides its services over a network that is not your private one and it is available for others to use. Usually it is off-site and provides a pay-per-usage billing model that could result in a cheaper solution, once it efficiently shares resources over the various customers.

Hybrid cloud combines your private or traditional information technology (IT) with a public cloud. Usually it is used to scale up and down your infrastructure systems to meet demand needs for seasonal businesses, spikes or financial closings, or to handle the application apart from the data storage, such as setting up the application layer in a public environment (for example a software as a service) while storing sensitive information in a private one.

Current infrastructure utilization

This is definitely one of the things you want to evaluate when considering a move to cloud. In traditional IT, businesses usually purchase their hardware based on utilization spikes in order to avoid issues when these scenarios occur. By doing that, organizations may end up with underutilized equipment, which could result in a huge waste of money. Taking a look at your performance and capacity reports can help you address these workloads on cloud and decide whether to release unused capacity for other workloads or simply move them over and avoid new investments.