Cloud Migration: Four Key Phases of Moving to the Cloud

Migrating your operations to the cloud is the cornerstone of a successful digital transformation. The move promises not only increased scalability and operational agility but can also save your business time and money. 

However, moving your on-premises system to the cloud is often a long multiphase process. Knowing the exact steps you must take is vital to ensure you hit the ground running.

In this article, we’re going to go over the four key phases of migrating to the cloud successfully.

Phase 1: Planning and Assessment

Assess your organisation’s needs and plan accordingly. After all, not knowing your requirements capabilities will lead to a messy migration process. Being aware of your existing infrastructure and processes (and their shortcomings) is key. 

Consider the following: 

• Risk identification and assessment: You need to be clear on what could create risks for your business – and how you can mitigate and handle these risks. What could possibly go wrong during the migration process? What critical processes and infrastructure do you have? What can you do to protect them during migration? By identifying and assessing risks correctly, you prevent the chance of any nasty surprises making the migration more difficult (or even catastrophic).
• Identifying dependencies: Certain things within your organisation will be dependent on other things. Identifying what is dependent on what can help you to reduce the risk of an IT disaster.
• Begin creating a migration strategy: With all this information, you’ll be able to start developing a migration strategy. This will be your guidebook for the rest of the process.

The ultimate goal is to understand the scope, costs and benefits of the migration – letting you create a solid foundation for the process.

Phase 2: Designing the Migration

Next, you’ll need to scope out the design of your migration. This phase is where the conceptual becomes practical – transforming strategies into actionable blueprints. 

The first step within this phase is to create a detailed design of the digital architecture to outline how your applications and data will live in the cloud.

This design should consider the cloud provider’s services and how they align with your business requirements, ensuring that the architecture is scalable, secure and efficient.

Here, you should also select the cloud services that you’ll use to power your processes. This selection is crucial as it impacts not only the performance and scalability of your applications but also the cost-effectiveness of the cloud solution. 

Services might include computing instances, storage options, database services and networking capabilities. 

Designing your migration must also include a comprehensive security strategy that aligns with industry standards and regulatory requirements. 

You should also consider how you’ll handle the data migration. What method will you use? In what order will you migrate information over? What redundancies will you have in plan to avoid data loss? How will you verify that all the data has been moved over successfully?

Phase 3: Executing the Migration

Here, you’ll actually undertake the migration process. This will be the physical action of moving over to the cloud, and getting your cloud implementation up and running. While it may seem like a simple switchover, it’s a lot more complex – and requires a lot of work, which is why so much planning is required beforehand.

By this point, you’ll be aware of what you have to do to ensure that the migration happens successfully. However, these are the most important considerations:

• Deployment: This is the process of actually rolling out your cloud infrastructure and ensuring that it’s up and running correctly. This means transferring data from your existing infrastructure and also setting up the applications that you’ll need.
• Downtime Management: As you migrate to the cloud, you’ll need to factor in some downtime. Making sure that this is done in the most efficient and effective way is vital because extended amounts of downtime can lead to lots of disruption and could possibly even damage your business if done carelessly. When will this downtime happen? Can you manage it so that your business-critical processes remain unaffected?
• Supervision: As with any project, it’s incredibly important to keep a careful eye on the process to ensure that it’s successful and that you’re aware of everything that’s happening.

Phase 4: Post-Migration Optimisation

Once the process of migration is complete, there are still certain things that need to be done to ensure success.

• Tuning and Right-Sizing: Making sure that your cloud optimisation is fine-tuned for your needs will ensure that you aren’t overspending. Are there any cloud resources that you’re not using? Can you scale anything down? 
• Implementing Best Practices: Making sure that you’re constantly following the industry standard and aware of what is best practice.
• Keep Updated: Cloud computing is always evolving. Providers are continually tinkering with their services and releasing new features. We recommend keeping up-to-date with the latest features to ensure your security patches are up to date. 
• Upgrading Your Implementation: Need more horsepower? Ready to move other processes over to the cloud? Just as you can scale down resources, you can upgrade your cloud implementation. 

The migration may be finished but you should still focus on maintaining your infrastructure and keeping it up to date. 

Looking to Move to the Cloud?

The cloud is a key modern technology – and migrating to it is becoming the choice for many organisations.

Want to get the most out of your cloud migration? Microsoft Gold Partner PSTG can help you scope, plan and execute your cloud migration.

If you’re looking to get started with the cloud but don’t know where to start, contact our experts today.