How to Mitigate Risk with These Cloud Migration Strategies
Efficient business operations and data accessibility heavily rely on cloud computing. Embracing the cloud is a cost-effective business solution that provides many competitive advantages, such as revenue growth and faster data recovery. While these benefits may have you convinced that now’s the time to migrate your data to the cloud, it’s important to take a step back and assess the risks involved with cloud migration.
Use the following strategies to help ensure that your cloud migration plan goes off without a hitch.
Make sure that you have a clear cloud migration strategy in place
Remember that there’s no set formula for cloud migration. Without rigorous planning and a clear migration strategy in place, you could end up with huge expenses and system failures.
It’s important to think about your cloud migration plan and what you’ll leave in data centers. Depending on your cloud infrastructure assessment, you may choose to adopt a hybrid cloud strategy – combining cloud and data center solutions. You must also decide whether to go with one cloud provider or opt for managing multiple cloud platforms.
Additionally, ask yourself these critical questions when determining your cloud migration strategy:
- Why do I need to migrate to the cloud?
- What benefits do I expect to achieve?
- Do I have mission-critical data that I need to store on-premises?
- What capacity do I require?
- How many cloud solutions do I need?
While it may be tempting to jump right in, proper planning will ultimately save you from future headaches.
Ensure the cloud solution you pick is compatible with existing architecture
The complexity of your current IT architecture could pose a potential risk for cloud migration. You may need to outsource skilled IT professionals to make your architecture fit your desired cloud environment. Organizations may or may not already have microservices architecture and cloud migration tools that further help the migration process. Determining what type of infrastructure you have in place will help you assess the best course of action for data migration.
Find a team of IT specialists who can conduct an audit of your legacy infrastructure, resolve any technical debt, determine interdependent parts and document your technology. This will help you pick a cloud solution compatible with your existing architecture while minimizing inconsistencies and interoperability problems between different systems.
Additionally, use Infrastructure as Code (IaC) – the process that automates infrastructure provisioning – to efficiently migrate legacy systems to the cloud while mitigating risk and reducing cost.
For organizations that wish to maintain more control over their cloud deployment, adopting the best solution for vCenter access is imperative. This provides direct access to VMware vCenter, including interoperability and compatibility with industry-leading third-party tools for an optimal application development environment.
Establish security policies
During cloud adoption, your organization must follow numerous security policies. If you are unaware of your company's cloud migration security and regulatory requirements, you could be at risk of your cloud architecture not complying with government regulations. If you fail to prioritize security during cloud deployment, you risk confidential data being breached.
Ensure that you have properly configured identity and access management to cloud data. Only a designated group in your organization needs to have access to this information to prevent a breach, so be selective when granting this access. Additionally, encrypting enterprise data and applications during the application migration process and once it’s stored in the cloud will help keep business data safe. By minimizing the risk of hackers accessing private information from the start, your cloud data will be in a much more secure place.
Plan for resource management
Employees who previously managed physical servers may not be the best people to deal with the cloud. Some cloud migration challenges might be over their heads, meaning you’ll need to employ the help of new talent. Once you have a set configuration and cloud monitoring tools, many IT tasks switch to the cloud provider.
If your organization doesn’t designate a cloud specialist, your employees might not receive the proper technical assistance when something goes wrong. Make sure your specialist is Cloud Certified and is knowledgeable about your business. These cloud experts should work with you to fully understand your specific business goals, technical needs and compliance and security requirements.
Achieve Successful Cloud Migration
As your enterprise moves its workloads to a cloud provider from on-premises and colocation data centers, assess the risks involved and determine how to mitigate them. Following these steps will help ensure a successful cloud migration strategy:
- Make sure that you have a clear cloud migration strategy in place
- Ensure the cloud solution you pick is compatible with existing architecture
- Prioritize communication and planning
- Establish security policies
- Plan for resource management
To ensure a smooth cloud migration process, incorporate Hosted Private Cloud - Advanced Access into your cloud strategy. By empowering your organization with these solutions, you can seamlessly prioritize cloud security and compliance regulations.