Migrating from on-premise or colocated servers to cloud infrastructure can give businesses huge advantages. According to a 2021 McKinsey & Company study, most companies plan to dedicate 80 percent of their IT hosting budget to cloud applications by 2024. If your company is one of those considering migrating your software to the cloud, there are a few things you’ll need to consider. This checklist will ensure that you have all your bases covered before making the switch.
1. Define your strategy
It’s important to have a clear strategy in place. Define your goals for migration, determine your business milestones, and think about the most critical and impactful workloads to help prioritize your effort. Consider how you’ll use the cloud to improve your business and decide on which changes you’ll need to make to any existing infrastructure. Our team at 27Global is specially trained in cloud transformation strategy. If you are struggling to plan for your cloud transformation, let our team take care of it.
2. Choose the right provider
There are many cloud providers to choose from. The most popular options are Microsoft Azure, Google Cloud Platform (GCP), and Amazon Web Services (AWS). To select one that best meets your needs, be sure to consider factors like in-house skill set, cost, features, and tech or customer support.
3. Understand your application portfolio
Make a list of all the applications you plan to migrate and categorize them by type. This will help you determine which ones can be moved easily, and which ones will require more work.
4. Assess your application dependencies
Identify your software, data, and integration dependencies to ensure you understand the complete picture of your application portfolio and the complexity of their interactions. With a large portfolio, understanding the dependencies can help produce a phased approach, where applications of common types and common dependencies can be migrated together to reduce rework.
5. Determine your data needs
A cloud migration project is also a data migration project. Data migration analysis should focus on identifying single-source-of-truth and simplifying data flows wherever possible. Look at what data needs to be migrated, which applications consume and produce that data, and examine how it should be stored in the cloud. You also need to consider how you’ll access your data, and what security measures need to be in place. This is also a good time to consider replacing point-to-point and direct connections with common APIs that can be consumed and extended across your portfolio.
6. Plan for security and compliance
Security and compliance are critical in terms of safeguarding your data. Make sure you have a plan in place for both data security and compliance with industry regulations. Take advantage of tools for static code analysis and vulnerability scanning to ensure your applications are modernized and secure. Move secrets and credentials out of your repositories and into key vaults for retrieval to reduce risk.
7. Execute your plan
Now is the time to execute. Leverage DevOps principles to shift left on security and quality. Use Infrastructure as Code (IAC) and CI/CD pipelines to support rapid iteration and deployments of your applications and databases.
8. Test and validate
Prior to migration, you’ll need to test and validate your plan. Involving subject matter experts and key users throughout to identify critical workflows, defining test cases where they may not exist, and following a thorough User Acceptance Testing process is key to success. This will help minimize downtime and ensure a smooth transition.
9. Optimize and scale
After your application is migrated, you can begin to optimize and scale it to meet your needs. This includes adding features, increasing capacity, and improving performance.
10. Manage and monitor your cloud environment
With the application running in the cloud, you can begin to use data collected through monitoring to optimize and scale it to meet your needs. This includes adding features, increasing capacity, and improving performance.
Migrating your software to the cloud might sound like a daunting task, but with careful planning and execution, it can be a smooth and successful process. 27Global is an AWS Advanced Tier Services Partner and a Microsoft Solutions Partner in Digital & App Innovation. Contact us today to get started with your company’s cloud transformation.
