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The Two Halves of Cloud Migration

By Calligo | 7 Dec 2020

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Cloud migration projects are like going on journeys – multiple directions to take, sights to see along the way and plenty of obstacles!

Journeys like this need guidebooks, written by people who have travelled the route hundreds of times before, just as Calligo has.

Calligo has created two guidebooks – one for each half of the journey – and a map, that together will help you identify the obstacles to overcome and the common wrong turns.

1st Half: Exploring the business case, planning your trip and setting off on the expedition

What does the first half of the cloud migration journey entail?

Defining your strategy

Measurable Business Objectives

A successful cloud migration needs to have clear and defined business objectives planned from the very start. There are three different types of objectives to consider: technical, strategic and end-user. All three need to be considered equally, ensuring you have balanced project outcomes that will benefit every corner of the business.

Public, Private or Hybrid Cloud?

Deciding which approach will be most beneficial to your business early on is crucial. Much of the success of the project depends on the suitability of the model you choose, so this is undoubtedly the area that requires the most careful consideration – and the hardest to reverse out of if you get it wrong.

Application Analysis

For any cloud migration, conduct a thorough assessment of all applications, tools and processes to determine their suitability for the cloud. It’s also important to be flexible when analysing your current applications; not everything will be suitable for the cloud, and some legacy applications can be replaced with newer cloud-based tools.

Vendor Selection

Once you have decided on your strategy, you now have to make the most important decision – the most suitable vendor to help you deliver on them. There are two areas to consider here: the technology and the service.

Technical preferences

These include questions like the vendors’ data centre locations and whether they meet your practical and data residency needs, or whether they have the security and governance frameworks in place to satisfy your own policies, plus a roadmap of development that will keep up with your needs.

Service preferences

What type of service are you looking for in a vendor? Do you need the support of a dedicated account manager or team, or is a personal service not necessary? What metrics are you looking for? Are the contracts and SLA assurances sufficient for your business and customers? And what additional useful services are in the portfolio that could help you not just store your data, but also help your teams extract insights from it, maintain its compliance or optimise the delivery of your data?

Compliance frameworks

What compliance frameworks can your potential vendor prove adherence to, and which are important to you? For example, ISO 27001, ISO 9001 and SOC 2 are all reasonably typical, but what is their stance on ISO 27018, the first international code of practice for the protection of persona data?

And how can they support your data residency and sovereignty needs? Are you nervous about the CLOUD Act or FISAs and will this vendor be vulnerable to such government data access requests?

2nd Half: How to perform the migration itself

Here are just some of the key aspects of any migration project.

The 6Rs of Cloud Migration

The six potential courses of action for each application when migrating to the cloud, including Rehosting, Rearchitecting or Retiring. You can find out more about the 6Rs of cloud migration, here.

Interoperability and Portability

Interoperability is vital to ensure as it enables cloud services to understand each other’s APIs and data formats in order to co-operate. It’s often frustrating due to a lack of standards, but it is regardless the key to much of the ROI of a cloud migration.

Portability

The ability to move your cloud environment from one cloud provider to another, often in response to price increases or outgrowing the current vendor. Fail to ensure this, and you will create your legacy of tomorrow.

Supplier management

A cloud migration inevitably involves the input of numerous suppliers. The main cloud platform provider is, of course, the key one, but you may also have new and pre-existing software vendors, MSPs and connectivity providers to consider – all of whom may have their own demands on the timeline.

Hidden costs

Just because the shift to the cloud removes the burdensome CAPEX investments, it does not mean the OPEX spend requires any less scrutiny. The benefit of OPEX models is that businesses only pay for what they use. What many forget is that the other side of this coin is that without constant oversight, there is a real danger of paying for surplus resources.

Interested in migrating to the cloud?

Our team of experts will guide you through the most appropriate deployment of cloud technology for your business. We’ll design a bespoke cloud strategy for your organization, ensuring your security and accessibility needs are met plus any data privacy obligations. The team will also select the most suitable platform and ensure a quick and smooth loud migration.

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