The cloud technology has been witnessing an impeccable growth contributing to the speed of tech-adoption and a drastic shift to cloud from legacy systems in recent times. However, it could turn painful if you do not plan it right.Here is the important cloud assessment checklist that you need to have when you consider cloud migration in your organization.

Cloud Assessment Checklist

To start with, having a checklist to gauge the level of readiness for a smooth migration to cloud is as important as the migration itself. Thus, an initial cloud assessment checklist is important to evaluate the infrastructure, expenditure, security, risks associated with cloud migration. Assessing all these factors helps your organization to discover, map and custom-strategize your migration process. Also, you will be able to choose the suitable type of migration such as lift and shift (rehost) to move application without code modification; replatform to move with some up-versioning; refactor to rearchitect or recode application

Creating Strategy, a Pre-requisite

The key factor for the ultimate success is to create a strategy for cloud migration for your organization. This will help you achieve targets without losses while a backup plan helps to face sudden contingencies that might arise in future. You need to have a powerful course of action, transition process and execution steps following the strategy.

Choose a suitable Cloud Service

There are several options available when you look for a cloud provider and selecting one among them depends on many factors like the most popular providers like AWS who have been serving to make it a commodity, Azure, Google, etc. According to your needs you can choose any of the following

AWS

  • Affordable and flexible for any all business needs
  • Updates and improvises its tool periodically
  • Best in customization and scaling

Azure

  • Best in storing unstructured data
  • Provides real time analytics and integrates with Microsoft products
  • Offers various prices and ready-to-use services

Google

  • Offers best management service
  • Enhances unity operations and has big data tools
  • Provides free and discounted services

Migrating to Cloud

Transition of database could be tricky but with the right tools and infrastructure it can be done easily. If it is hard to initially move completely to cloud, you can take it slowly by moving to virtual machines and then to cloud for better agility. During migration you can reduce disruption by using data management systems that helps to take backup of all data. You can minimize error in this process through a testing strategy that enables you to check whereabouts of the data. Constant monitoring on the new environment and adapting to it is essential and there are several tools available to monitor the cloud service.

Though there are common phases derived through many successful migrations, you can always customize them to meet your business needs and it is known as phased approach.

Phase1: Business Plan: This phase involves an enabler such as sponsorship requirement to develop and endorse platform strategies, a team of stake holders and others to formulate the process with technology.

Phase2: Portfolio plan: By understanding the interdependencies of applications and business dependencies, you can derive cost of ownership by collecting information on resource, provisioning, process and behavioral pattern which helps to plan the business portfolio.

Phase 3: Execution & Review Phase: Based on the strategy adopted, you can redesign and optimize application to run on selected platforms followed by validation of different operations using test plan. Post execution, reviewing the design, migration and execution phase through post implementation review (PIR) is essential to record them for future migration purposes

Likewise, one can derive out their application through various such phases customized to meet their business needs. By the use of different tools and methodologies for different service provider you can adopt any model and process like AWS migration best practice or Azure migration best practice.

Ensure Security Compliance      

There is no compromise when it comes to data security and compliance and it is important to protect the storage infrastructure with firewall, anti-virus and other multidimensional security features. Since cyber security is a big concern, you need to ensure complete protection of sensitive information from online attacks. Also, it is essential to be compliant with the latest updates and to abide the regulation to avoid liability.

Licensing Management

One of the most important ways to lay a strong foundation for your Cloud services is Cloud license management. Many organizations move to cloud to save cost on On-premise and reduce resource usage but there are more to it if you know about license management process. It consists of re-harvesting, right sizing and storage management where each process is measured and compared with the existing license to decide if they need to cut down or add different licenses.

Cost Optimization

For an effective cost optimization, you need to focus on transferring files within same region to minimize expenditure as it is cheaper to transfer within a region; you may compress the data using algorithms to reduce storage requirement and cost; deleting unwanted file that are unstable and unused for a long time saves some cost; using cache storage on cloud produces good results for data that require resilience.

Get started with Cloud, now!

Deciding to adopt Cloud migration could be a right choice for your business continuity and it is no more a daunting process when you start by following data center migration to cloud checklist carefully. It offers easy access to resources, security, rapid recovery and when you do it the right way you can ensure a safe migration avoiding huge pitfalls. This will pave way for a smooth transition and a successful journey.

Aspire offers Cloud migration services for all your requirements. To know more…

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4 Things to consider before migrating your Database to Cloud

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