In recent years Cloud First strategy had people feel they had to move their businesses to the cloud quickly, no matter what. The reality is that this rush to the cloud can be a risky deal. The real challenge is determining whether the organization is really ready to make the move and how to make the move when the time is right. To be successful, organizations have to establish the processes, operations, culture, training and skillsets that are aligned with the cloud.

Cloud can be a force multiplier and can make your organization’s profit grow, if the workflows and strategies are well conceived. But if these aspects are not well aligned with cloud environments, it can introduce significant risk to the organization. For example, when organizations migrate to the cloud without the required cost management capabilities, they are often shocked by the bills that come in.

Here are the 6 Key Strategies and Considerations to be kept in mind while managing large-scale cloud migrations

Effective Planning

A successful cloud migration starts with an effective plan that maintains a perfect balance between the short-term and the long-term. It’s very critical to establish reachable goals, you have to be realistic about what can be accomplished while keeping a vision with innovative ideas and roadmaps.

Leverage agile approach, set up an effective roadmap with quick wins that contribute to long-term goals. Have an effective communication regularly with leadership teams about the short-term milestones results, the long-term vision, and the value proposition.

Stay Focused

While pursuing a long-term, large-scale project, it’s important to focus on core objectives, including higher-level course corrections and daily tactical requests and changes. In encountering these requests and changes, continually ask yourself:

• Why would we do this?
• Is it important for making the project successful?
• If we built this, will anybody use it?

Account For Organization Culture

When it comes to cloud migration, cultural barriers are of great significance in determining success. While managing a cloud migration, you need to take a 360-degree overview of the organization’s culture. “Look at the employee/staff skill sets, their habits, and the way of their approach; how the various teams operate presently and how they deliver services to customers and so on.” You need to have these people gone through proper training and enhance their skillsets in order to make the migrations successful.

On a practical level, it’s also important to consider the benefits of automation, as it removes a lot of the mundane and tedious tasks that teams have to do. But one another concern is to strategize properly and keep it in balance as within operations and engineering teams that their roles will be impacted. To ensure a wide support and participation, establish a portal/forum for communication that addresses these concerns and focus on the positive side. Automation and cloud migrations can enable organizations to deliver services at a much faster rate with higher consistency and cost effectively, so the workforce can really focus on goals and initiatives that matters the most to the organization’s mission.

Promote Staff, Their Knowledge and Skills

To build a good organisation culture, it’s important to promote from within people. Have a look at existing IT teams for staff who can assist with cloud migrations and work on automation part. Provide those staff members with proper training and certifications to help them stay update with the current technology and skills. This empowers them to be more innovative and deliver value to their organizations.

Evaluate Processes

One of the biggest challenges that organisations face is understanding how current processes will operate when shifted to the cloud. To reap the optimum benefit, you will have to advance and modernize these processes, so they support dynamic cloud environments and provide higher scalability and agility, as teams pursue DevOps and agile and CI/CD pipelines, etc, faster than ever before.

Make an Approaches For Managing Cost, Security, Automation

Before making a move to the cloud, it’s very crucial to plan and strategize for how costing, security, and automation will be managed and assess whether current approaches and technologies are still relevant or up-to-date with the market trends. Determine where the bottlenecks that may hinder the organization’s ability to keep pace with the cloud evolution. Often, organizations will need to modernize, establishing cloud-native approach and technologies and cloud environments.

Capacity cost management: Cloud consumption generates costs and it can fluctuate very quickly and dramatically. The cloud cost risks have to be identified and mitigated proactively. It’s important to right-size resources and ensure that users request what they actually need and provide teams a holistic view so they can make more informed decisions.

Security: While it’s common to leave an on-premises server on at all times but in a cloud environment, you may routinely power off the servers for the cost reduction. What will happen if that server needs to be patched (repair a flaw)? Teams need to ensure they can apply controls and handle problems consistently and efficiently in these dynamic environments, before they can migrate sensitive data and workloads to the cloud.

Automation: As we all know cloud environments are dynamic in nature, employing advanced automation tools that align with cloud-native technologies is very critical to ensure a sustainable cloud implementation.

Conclusion

To navigate the complexities of a migration within such a large organizations and companies, Aarav Solutions team had worked across several operational and organizational layers.  Applying an agile-based approach, we focus on establishing connectivity, architecture, and security parameters and addressed specific operational efforts, such as incident and change management, monitoring, and patching.

If your organization is thinking to adopt new cloud or a multi-cloud approach, following some of the proven strategies mentioned above can be quite invaluable. By following the best practices, your team can manage cloud migrations with optimum efficiency and realize the maximum benefits after migration over a longer-term.

And remember that your team doesn’t have to do it alone. Trusted service providers like Aarav Solutions are experts in providing strategic and practical guidance to help you manage and migrate your business to cloud successfully.

To learn more about cloud migration, get in touch with us at contact@aaravsolutions.com