9 Best Practices For Your Cloud Migration

Executives often wonder what some of the best practices are for migrating applications to Cloud quickly and confidently. Although the organisational structure and business objectives of every enterprise varies, there are certain patterns and practices the AltoStack team has learned through our Cloud Migration practice that tend to ring true for every kind of company. Here’s a non-exhaustive list of some of these:

Pre-Migration Stage

1. Set and outline a clear cloud governance model

As you embark on moving to the cloud, consider how this vision will influence and change your organisations strategy. Even more important is clearly sharing and communicating why the strategy is important to the organisation.

2. Train and up skill staff early in the process

The more knowledgeable your teams are around the Cloud, the smoother the transition will be. This process needs to happen early in the journey, before you make organisational-wide decisions on the future state of your IT landscape in the Cloud.

3. Select the right partners to help you along the journey

You should look for those that have not only the technical expertise and experience migrating to the Cloud, but also the right agile methodology and project management framework. Allow yourself time to vet them and ask for references prior to selecting a cloud partner.

Migration Stage

4. Start small and simple

It’s important to put some quick wins on the the board as you get started. The more your staff becomes comfortable with Cloud services, and the faster your stakeholders see the benefits, the easier it will be to “sell” the vision internally. To do so, you need consistency and transparency, and we see many organisations using a series of quick wins to get there.

5. Automate

The cloud’s agility can only be realised through automation. Take a step back to examine your current processes and establishing new ones that can take advantage of it as you migrate. If not all of your aspects can be automated, carefully determine which ones can, and empower your team to do so.

6. Approach the cloud as transformational

Migrating to the cloud is a huge change, adjust your internal processes so that they’re able to embrace this technological change. Use that transformational nature to your advantage to align stakeholders with this new paradigm.

7. Leverage managed services

Whichever provider you’ve chosen as your preferred public cloud provider, take advantage of using their fully managed services such as database, cache or CDN. This will free up your team to focus on what matters most: your customers.

Post-Migration Stage

8. Monitor everything

Having a comprehensive monitoring strategy in place will ensure you include every detail when it comes to robust architectures for you applications. Having data-driven insights into how your environment is performing will empower you to make smart business decisions when considering tradeoffs between performance and costs.

9. Leverage paid support

All public cloud providers offer different tiers of support for their customers; From Technical Account Managers to concierges, they get to be part of your broader virtual cloud team and can provide a central point of contact and escalation path with the chosen provider, as well as an invaluable source of technical information and guidance.

Over the last two years we have led and advised enterprises on multiple cloud migration projects. For more information on how our Cloud Migration practice can help your Cloud Transformation initiatives, click here.