The overnight transition to remote working has been a lesson in needing infrastructure that’s flexible, scalable and reliable. And successful deployments go beyond just a migration: they require a cohesive, phased strategy, leadership and bullet-proof security.
Right now, we’re seeing businesses looking to catch up on their cloud strategies. There’s some simple steps to avoid when you’re leading a successful cloud migration – from failing to put a cloud-first culture in place through to data protection strategies. We’ll unpack these for you here, to ensure your deployment’s a success.
This sounds obvious – we get so many enquiries about migrating to the cloud because companies “think they should.” Bringing the cloud into your enterprise infrastructure has to have a well-defined business purpose as does transitioning your data: what do you want from your cloud migration?
Get clear on organisational pain points so you know how cloud becomes part of this strategy. Are you looking to shift your remote working policies over the long term? Are you looking at prioritising agility within the business? Is this about taking costs out of a legacy server? Each of these require different strategies to deliver a successful deployment. Being clear from the outset is essential.
Transitioning to the cloud is as much about a cultural shift as a technical one. It will ultimately change the way your business works, beyond IT, to operations, finance, HR and of course, communications. Buy-in for this change has to come from the top, working closely with your IT leads to map out the business impact as you move over to the cloud – whether you’re looking at a hybrid or complete solution. It requires future-focused leadership.
We always recommend understanding the component parts of drivers, the risks as well as the changes cloud platforms enable. Listen to your IT teams as they create a communications plan to ensure the business understands and leverages new cloud capabilities and applications to get the most out of your cloud investment.
Once an organisation has committed to transitioning to the cloud, they want to do everything at once. Don’t.
Many businesses have a hybrid model to ease the transition, from a business and tech perspective and we always recommend phasing your cloud deployment. By migrating specific bits of data in stages, you can ensure your enterprise becomes familiar with your provider’s cloud solutions as you go. We recommend migrating non-essential or test data first.
