By Colin Woods @ColinWoods_  LinkedIn. 

Top tips for a smooth transition. 

Making the move to a new data centre or migrating to a cloud solution is a daunting task.
Perhaps you’re pushing forward with ambitious digital transformation plans? Or maybe your current data centre is reaching end of life - power and cooling are at breaking point and you’re struggling to keep pace with capacity demands. 

Whatever the reason for making the move – scaling up or down DC footprint or refreshing the DC environment – the transition management process itself is a mission critical task.

Done right, your migration should deliver significant benefits and newfound efficiencies. Alongside enhanced business agility and optimised performance, this is a great opportunity to simplify DC management or initiate an extensible infrastructure that allows you to implement new technologies faster and more frequently.

Here are our top tips for a smooth transition:

Tip 1. Define your needs

Hammering down your requirements is an essential first step. Do you need co-location services? Are there any funding challenges that need to be taken into account? What about capacity? Are you in expansion or growth mode? When preparing for an imminent transition, you should aim to map out your anticipated requirements for the next five to six years.

Tip 2: Know what’s what

You may well have a handle on your inventory assets, but what about application dependencies? A comprehensive assessment of all internal and external computing, network and storage resources is key to understanding what’s taking place in the existing environment.

Using these findings you’ll be able to make some important strategic decisions – like what should stay in house and what could be better handled by external or service providers. You’ll also be able to identify potential savings opportunities, free up resources and right size your compute infrastructure.

Tip 3: Risk reduction

Minimising unplanned downtime and data loss is an essential aspect of any migration programme, so a gold platted disaster recovery process is a must have. Ideally you should conduct a trial migration in a test environment to ensure all apps work as expected in their new environment.

Tip 4: Ensure you have the resources and expertise in place

Orchestrating a great DC migration is a major challenge. But working with a trusted IT partner, who has extensive experience at DC transition management, can help fill any resource and knowledge gaps. From auditing the existing environment to evaluating every aspect of your new environment – including connectivity and latency requirements – can save IT managers unnecessary headaches and stress further down the line.

You might like to read the other blog in these series - 'How to maxmise the benefits of Cloud Services' Or read more about Azure Advanced Threat Protection.