Looking at the current circumstances, businesses are forced to shift their workloads to the cloud.  The recent lockdown event has caused huge upheavals for many businesses as they face the need to maintain business operations in the middle of the global pandemic of COVID-19. As lockdown continues and remote working remains on the top of the list, migration to the cloud becomes an urgent need than just a luxury.

There are businesses in which running a cloud migration project is daunting, whether it is private or public cloud setting. After implementing the cloud base scenario, there will be a significant change in the working—on how resources are managed, monitored, and consumed. The infrastructure requires more administration when the company decides to rely on someone else for handling critical systems, and it can trigger mild panic.

To keep calm and carry on with cloud migration, everyone in the organization should adapt to the new strategy.

Several ways of a company building confidence in cloud migration project are listed below:

Educate everyone

Information and education are a part of confidence building. It is significant to conduct activities such as workshops, provide training, create accurate documentation, or make a team available to answer all the queries is above all.

It is needed that someone senior within the business involves in the ongoing migration so that they are clear on how to fight your corner if the going gets tough. Cloud migration is an ongoing process as, throughout the migration, the customer will not remember the demo or service request, while they are amidst an aggressive migration schedule.                                                                     

Assess and plan

The migration team and customer will develop good confidence once they fully understand the source environment, migration process, and the target state. Creating a detailed map of the current environment will help in creating interdependencies, which can be used for post-migration testing, though not everyone possesses the required knowledge and understanding about the platform. The best way to boost confidence is to create run books after using assessment information for each application that details on how the application is put together, moved, and rolled back.

Stay in touch

From the perspective of a cloud service provider, getting the solution architects, service delivery staff, and technical engineers, before and during the migration activities, will massively help in building confidence. And those organizations that are running a migration internally should stay close to the application owners, service desk users, and other heads of departments to combat the state of downtime.

Since people are more likely to trust someone they have met in person, businesses should use this to their advantage.

Test and test

Whether it is the simplest application or static website, there is no such thing as enough testing. After the test, IT teams should make sure to introduce feedback loops and analyze why things failed and what was the point of success. It is quite common to uncover issues during the failover tests, which is a positive thing because problems discovered during testing can be resolved than those in a real-life situation.

Organizations might have used the migration method several times but fail to remember that they are dealing with people who only own negative thoughts on applications. So, instead of showing mere trust, businesses should use evidence of testing, again and again, to build up confidence.

Mitigating cloud risk

After implementing cloud architecture, it is important to ensure that the database is safe and secure. Here are some cloud security mechanisms that you can use to stay safe:

  • Take sufficient time to set up a cloud account and ensure that users get appropriate privileges. Never allow shared accounts and remember to give the least privilege to each user.
  • Avoid manually performing processes such as transfer and backups, instead, automate everything. It is the right way to avoid any kind of human error.
  • Delegate and divide duties to maintain cloud infrastructure. For instance, assign team members a duty to ensure that every provider utilized is staying up-to-date with patches.
  • Bring in a tool suite that allows you to easily “drill down” and timely identify malicious users. Keep track of data going in and out from the database.

Looking forward

Though there are risks involved in cloud migration, the benefits are hard to ignore. Of course, it is important to be mindful of the risk involved with the practice. Instead of avoiding the cloud migration process completely, use best practices, safety tips, and an efficient team involving a strong chain of tools and suppliers. To know more about Cloud technology, you can download our latest whitepapers on Cloud.