Many organisations have considered or are considering moving their IT infrastructure to the cloud. But what does this actually mean in terms of practical actions? In this article we will discuss creating a cloud migration strategy, planning your cloud migration and how best to find the right cloud migration services.

With distributed working practices becoming the norm and increasingly flexible working patterns, migrating to the cloud allows greater scope for adding and removing IT services for your workforce.

What Is Involved in Cloud Migration Services?

Cloud Migration is the process of moving your IT resources onto a cloud based infrastructure so that your data and software applications are run from the cloud rather than on local PCs or servers.

There are different types of cloud migration, for example if a company is taking its first step into a cloud based system, then they will be moving their data and applications from their on-site IT infrastructure onto their new remote cloud infrastructure.

If an organisation already has their systems based in the cloud, then another type of cloud migration is to move from one cloud service provider to another in a cloud to cloud transfer. This may be required for several reasons including improved performance, cost savings or to consolidate your IT services into one place as they often develop over time in different locations or have been inherited from another organisation as your business develops.

Cloud Migration Strategy

Your cloud migration strategy should include both a plan for the technological aspects but perhaps more importantly an understanding of the staff impact too. You will of course need to plan for any potential service downtime for transferring applications and data from one system to another, but you will also need to prepare and train your team on new working methods and to test that any new systems are fully understood and operational.

Communicating any potential disruption to your customer base is also a key element to avoid any loss of business credibility.

Creating a Cloud Migration Plan

In order to create your cloud migration plan you need to consider the following elements:

• Create a detailed map of your current IT infrastructure and applications.
• Ensure you fully understand how these elements are connected and how data is passed between them.
• Create a list of new applications compared to existing ones and ensure they are suitable to be cloud based.
• List the order that data and applications are to be transferred and what milestones should be achieved before moving on to the next stage.
• Build the new cloud infrastructure ready for the migration.
• Create a data backup plan for disaster recovery should a problem occur.
• Perform a test migration of a limited set of data, applications and users and have the resultant set up extensively tested.
• Move the remaining data and applications.
• Check and test, all the while building new backups should you need to fall back to the previous stage.

Involving a cloud migration consultant or specialist will be very helpful at this stage as they will generally have more experience of what has worked for a wide variety of organisations as well as being able to give an outside view of your own plan. Helping you to spot weaknesses before they become major issues.

Providers of Cloud Migration Services

If your business is in the process of migrating its infrastructure to the cloud then there are many cloud service providers to choose from. Forming a good working relationship with your provider is key to the success of the project as it is unlikely to be 100% problem free so you need a reliable supplier who understands your organisation in detail.

Anywhere Technologies has provided many successful migrations across a broad range of sectors including logistics, retail, healthcare and hospitality. We would be happy to advise you on the best steps for your business so please get in touch to find out more about our cloud migration services.