Organizations migrating an IT environment to the cloud are making a major commitment. A migration typically involves extensive planning and preparation before the move is actually performed. All the preparatory work culminates in a cutover date and time when the cloud infrastructure goes live to support business operations.
However, simply moving the environment to a cloud platform does not signal that the migration is complete. Teams must monitor the new infrastructure and evaluate its performance against pre-migration expectations, benchmarks, and metrics. You need to verify that the migration has delivered the benefits that influenced your decision to migrate.
Why Did You Choose to Migrate to the Cloud?
Companies may decide to migrate to the cloud for several reasons. The following are the most common motivations for migrating.
- Cost-efficiency: Moving to the cloud saves the cost of purchasing servers and maintaining an on-premises data center. When the cloud environment is properly sized, the business pays only for the resources it uses and does not have to overprovision to handle peak usage.
- Scalability and flexibility: Cloud resources such as CPU, memory, and storage can scale instantly to meet fluctuating demand. This flexibility makes it easy for companies to grow and save money by scaling down to avoid waste when demand wanes.
- Improved agility: Teams can spin up servers and deploy new applications more quickly in the cloud than in a traditional IT environment. This speed helps businesses capitalize on emerging opportunities and customer trends.
- Advanced technology: Cloud providers offer on-demand access to cutting-edge solutions such as AI/ML tools and big data analytics applications. Businesses can leverage this technology to gain a competitive edge in their market sector.
- Enhanced security and compliance: Businesses can work with cloud providers that offer compliance-ready infrastructure to meet data privacy and security regulations such as HIPAA and PCI DSS. Cloud vendors typically deliver strong security with advanced solutions such as web application firewalls and intrusion detection and response (IDR) tools.
- Disaster recovery preparedness: Companies can develop robust disaster recovery capabilities by using cloud resources. Many providers support recovery across regions for greater resiliency during major disasters.
- Increased business focus: Organizations that adopt managed cloud services let the provider’s technical team handle infrastructure maintenance. Teams can devote more time and effort to core business activities that drive growth and competitiveness.
- Streamlined availability: Cloud resources can be accessed from any location with an internet connection, supporting a mobile workforce and fostering collaboration with global teams.
How to Ensure the Migration is a Success
Businesses that want a successful migration need to treat it as an ongoing exercise. They need to take several steps immediately after moving the environment to the cloud to verify uninterrupted business operations. They must also implement continuous processes to ensure they maximize their cloud investment and optimize the new environment.
Immediately after the migration
The first step is to validate that the migration moved all scheduled workloads to the new infrastructure. Teams must verify that all applications and data resources are accessible in the cloud, including dependencies and integrations that are easy to overlook. Compare pre-migration metrics with the new environment to identify issues that can be corrected with proper tuning.
Companies should implement cost governance procedures to control cloud costs, which can quickly spiral out of control without oversight. Tag all cloud resources by owner and cost center to enable accountability for cost issues. Set up anomaly alerts so you catch cost overruns or spikes promptly, not at the end of a billing cycle. Teams overprovision when planning the move, and the environment should be right-sized as soon as real usage is known to reduce costs.
Verify that backups are running as expected to protect newly housed cloud data. Teams must test the cloud disaster recovery procedures to ensure they work in the new environment. In some cases, teams must make significant changes to disaster recovery and failover processes to minimize operational disruptions and support business continuity.
Organizations must review cloud security to limit access and minimize the attack surface. Threat actors may search for and target vulnerabilities introduced to recently migrated workloads. Audit identity and access management (IAM) platforms to ensure the migration has not inadvertently granted excessive privileges. Teams must verify that no internal-only applications or resources are now publicly available. Companies must understand the cloud’s shared security responsibility model and meet their responsibilities.
Steady-state cloud optimization
Companies should view the cloud environment as a constantly evolving entity that requires care to remain healthy and productive. Teams must stay vigilant in monitoring and addressing performance and cost anomalies that undermine cloud benefits. Set alerts to identify business impacts in addition to resource-usage thresholds. Delete orphaned or overprovisioned resources as part of a regularly scheduled review process.
Avoid old habits such as manual scaling that worked in an on-premises environment but go against core cloud principles. Teams should look to modernize functionality when possible, for example, by adopting managed services or breaking large applications into microservices. Taking a modern approach to legacy business functions can optimize the migration’s benefits while controlling costs.
Review cloud resource ownership after the migration. Resources that may have been under the migration team’s purview can end up with no owner, leading to cost overruns and security vulnerabilities. Conduct these reviews regularly to address the dynamic nature of cloud environments.
A Comprehensive Cloud Management Platform
VAST View helps answer the questions that ensure your cloud migration is successful for your business. The platform offers a managed approach to cloud migration, management, and optimization, starting with discovery and assessment to ensure resources move for valid business reasons. We help you plan and migrate to the new environment with a skilled, experienced team.
After migration, VAST VIEW helps manage, optimize, and orchestrate the cloud infrastructure to maximize your technology investment. The platform’s visibility identifies tuning and automation opportunities to streamline your business operations.
Talk to our team today to learn how we can help you migrate and manage your cloud environment effectively so your business can thrive.
