Many of today’s largest companies have moved to the cloud, each eager to take advantage of the high degree of flexibility, scalability, and affordability such a move offers.
You may have analyzed the needs of your own business and thought about doing the same to reap those same benefits. If so, then you, as a business owner or leader, need to realize that moving to the cloud is not something to be casually considered, let alone charged headlong. Like any other big business strategy change, a cloud migration requires not only careful planning and thorough analysis, but also taking into account several important considerations.
These considerations are especially important because they can help you decide whether or not moving to the cloud is something that would truly benefit your business, as well as allow you to mitigate potentially detrimental consequences up front.
To help you make your final decision, we’ve put together a list of the most significant key considerations, and it’s available for you to read below.
Do you have the necessary applications or resources to integrate the data coming from your on-premises and cloud-based services?
For example, let’s say you’ve started moving certain applications and services to the cloud, or you may have started using various programs made by different providers. You may have digital asset management in the cloud for your marketing department provided by a business and other SaaS providers for customer relationship management and enterprise resource planning.
Cloud migration, whether it’s a partial relocation or a complete move, can seriously affect the way you do business today. One of the most significant ways you can do this is through how you collect, store, and interact with your data—the applications, files, and services that are necessary for the daily operations of your business. For example, let’s say you’ve started moving certain applications and services to the cloud, or you may have started using various programs made by different providers. You may have one SaaS provider for your HR services and other providers for customer relationship management and enterprise resource planning.
Logically, the files or data generated by the applications can be stored on the same cloud servers from which they run. Due to its disparate and separate nature, it may be difficult for your employees to access that data for their own use, or your internal applications may not be able to exchange data with cloud applications. This could result in costly production downtime or lost productivity.
Fortunately, enterprise-class solutions that facilitate the seamless integration of data from on-premises and cloud services exist and are available today. These solutions are designed to remedy data silo problems that cloud migration can cause, allowing your employees or internal applications to access that data anywhere, anytime. They can also help better secure the flow of data between your disparate databases, using current encryption and security technologies to protect your files from hacking and interception attacks.
Is the cloud platform you chose compatible with the way your current IT infrastructure is set up?
Another important consideration to consider before migrating to the cloud is whether the cloud platform you chose is truly compatible with the way your current IT infrastructure is set up. While the cloud industry has certainly had time to evolve, with many service providers popping up all over the place and competing with each other, there is still a strong chance that your target platform may not be able to provide you with the support you need.
Examples of these significant deficiencies may include the platform not being compatible with your operating system or lacking the resources to improve the way your migrated applications/services originally run. Finding out if these limitations exist before you commit to a contract can go a long way to alleviate your cloud migration woes, as well as help you find the right cloud service provider.
What kind of support does the chosen cloud service provide?
On the surface, cloud migration means having business-critical applications and data stored on an offsite server. As such, the smoothness of your day-to-day operations, or whether they will run at all, will largely depend on the server being up and accessible as much as possible. Any failure or downtime at the server end will obviously result in your applications and data being inaccessible and as such will cause costly service delays and customer transaction congestion at your end.
To that end, the owner of the cloud service you chose to migrate to should be able to provide you with adequate support in the event of these outages. At the very least, they should be able to provide you with the resources you need to continue your business operations, even in a limited capacity. Also, you should be able to contact them easily, and their response to your support call should be quick and decisive. The downtime itself must also be resolved quickly.
Figure this out in advance by interviewing some of the current customers of your chosen cloud service provider. Ask about times they have had to ask for support and how it went overall. Was the support team courteous and responsive to your requests? Did they work quickly and respond to requests, or were they prone to delays? You are also likely to find reviews about your chosen provider online, but take these with a grain of salt as reviews can be manipulated or even fabricated.
By doing this before you sign a contract and continue with your cloud migration process, you can assess whether or not your business will be served in case something unexpected happens.
See also: Top 5 Small Business Cloud Providers
Does cloud migration present a clear risk to your IT infrastructure evolution roadmap?
Another serious consideration to keep in mind is whether or not there is any possibility that the growth of your IT infrastructure will be limited or blocked due to migration to the cloud. This is due to the inherent fact that when you migrate your applications to a cloud server, ultimately you are not only relying on the service provider’s ability to keep the servers up and running, but also on the very technology they have been built on. based on its own infrastructure. .
If, for example, they are known to stick to outdated legacy hardware for long periods of time, with a few upgrades in the foreseeable future, opportunities to expand or build out their own infrastructure may be limited. You should make sure that the updates you’re looking for work well with your cloud service provider’s equipment and won’t cause costly outages or downtime due to incompatibilities.
Proper investigation and consultation are key to preventing a scenario like the above. You can also choose to choose two or even three cloud service providers as redundancies, to mitigate any risk. If one starts to misbehave or break their infrastructure roadmaps as promised, then you can easily part ways with that vendor, with little downtime or lost productivity on your part.
See also: How can cloud-based dental software streamline the operation?
Is cloud migration something that makes financial sense for your company?
Finally, you need to consider whether migrating to the cloud really works better for you financially or whether you should instead invest in more internal technology and infrastructure upgrades. To be clear, the fact that cloud services give you the ability to scale your infrastructure more affordably is one of their strongest points, one that businesses of all sizes could easily benefit from. However, it must be recognized that cloud adoption also carries certain additional risks and costs that could outweigh those savings, such as the need for more complex data security solutions.
Investing in on-premises hardware and technology can cost more up front, but some businesses can easily pay that much over a long period of time through installments or payment facilities. This makes the financial burden much lighter and allows the business to benefit from the security and stability of having their infrastructure on site. Carefully weigh the value proposition of each approach, as the wrong one could end up costing you more in the long run.
Cloud migration could be the key to your company’s success
With competitors emerging everywhere, companies of all sizes and in all industries have to consider all available options to stay ahead of the pack. Cloud migration is one of the most viable they can choose from, especially since it has great potential to level the playing field when it comes to affordable scalability, reliability, and agility. However, those same companies need to make sure they take the above five considerations seriously before choosing to migrate to the cloud.
