Informed Cloud Migration Decisions That Ensure IT Resilience

Cloud migration can be one of the most important decisions an organization undertakes. It promises to bring more agility, scalability, and cost efficiency —but getting there isn’t always smooth.

As with any major initiative, it’s crucial to have a well-designed cloud migration process in place before you begin.

Otherwise, the migration is likely to take too long, cost too much, run into trouble with compliance requirements, or simply fail to deliver the benefits you were counting on.

The key:  Know your environment. Yep, all of it.

To confront the challenges and make decisions about which assets will be migrated, and when and how they will be migrated, you must first gain a thorough understanding of your workload attributes (relevant to the business, performance, security, interdependencies, and data volume).

Next, you must consider the cumulative impact of these attributes on your workload placement decisions. And that means gathering data to assess your current environment, analyzing options, deciding which applications will require enhancements to ensure they will continue to meet inevitable technology changes without causing disruption.

To do this right requires more than simply taking inventory. You must not only discover your assets but capture their business context too, so you understand how they power specific business services. Given the rapid rate of change in today’s dynamic digital environments, even the most current information you collect is liable to become out-of-date and unreliable quickly.

Consider if a new regulation or security measure is rolled out that impacts your industry, how will you know which data and applications need to be updated? Can you immediately make changes and have confidence that no application will be missed or won’t cause an outage?

Before you begin your cloud migration, make sure your discovery process is robust and able to capture all this information in an actionable platform, so it informs the migration process end to end. The results will not only serve the organization through the migration decisions, but also be available for ongoing and future operations to ensure relevancy, resiliency, and recovery.