Cloud Migration 101: How to Prepare for Your First Migration to the Cloud

By: Uri Teva, Business Development Manager, Cloudride

Large cloud migrations can be exhausting, resource-intensive projects, demanding high-touch handling from all compute-related departments such as IT, Data Security, Development, DevOps and Management. Lacking a proper, proven and tech-savvy plan, the project, with all the resources invested, has great chances to fail and crumble in a flash.

Choosing the right partners can be a great hassle if you are an organization set on a quick, incident-free cloud migration to AWS. You would have to filter through large data sets to find the right partner or risk entrusting the wrong people with the future of your business. AWS introduced the different AWS Competency Programs in 2016 to stem this challenge and help you work with people with the right experience and skills in cloud migration.

Should You Hire a Cloud Migration Consultant?

AWS partners assist you with your cloud migration. This is especially important if your company lacks the required knowledge to handle a migration project at this magnitude, a team of solution architects and a small army of DevOps at your side. AWS Partners are domain experts in AWS functions and services, giving you the highest value during your cloud migration.

Prior to to making the critical decision to hire a cloud migration specialist, ask yourself the following questions:

• Is your current team well-resourced to handle the AWS Well-Architected Framework?
• Does your staff understand the AWS Well-Architected Framework?
• Do they have prior experience using AWS IaC tools to manage infrastructure as code and automate operations?
• Does your company feel secure enough to invest the needed funds to migrate to the cloud?
• Will you need additional funding on top of the AWS offer?

Preparing for an AWS Migration

Cloud migration requires careful planning. The planning stage involves reviewing your existing systems, defining your objectives, and generating a migration approach.

Infrastructure Assessment

A successful AWS migration begins with evaluating a business’s on-premises or existing cloud environment. It includes the applications, data infrastructure, security measures, and potential risks. Migration experts who are AWS partners can help you get ready with a checklist of best practices.

Map Out Your Cloud Journey

Once you have a clear view of your current environment, build a sweeping migration strategy. It should consider all the important factors, such as downtime tolerance, budgetary constraints, and your specific business objectives.

Your migration expert will help design a complete AWS strategy tailored to your goals and constraints, which will facilitate a smooth migration.

Security First

Security is a key element of any enterprise cloud migration in this era of massive data breaches and cyber threats. Your migration to the AWS cloud has to be executed securely and efficiently. The migration expert will help you achieve these objectives by providing the following guardrails:

• Conducting security assessments to identify and eliminate susceptibilities in your present infrastructure prior to migration to AWS.
• Implementing AWS’s best security protocol practices to protect your cloud. These will include Identity and Access Management (IAM), encryption, and many monitoring tools safeguarding your cloud workloads.
• Protecting your data on AWS by conforming your migration to industry-specific compliance regulations such as HIPAA, PCI and GDPR.
• When done correctly, your organization will benefit from threat detection and incident response tools to continuously protect your AWS workloads.

Optimize for AWS

A cloud migration consultant will help you utilize opportunities where applicative modernizations can be achieved, while calculating the risks vs. benefit factors allowing data-driven decisions be made. You’ll thus benefit fully from the AWS features and services. Not only will you improve your application’s performance and resilience, but also maximize your return of investment.

Minimize Disruption

When building a migration strategy, minimal disruption of your enterprise is a priority to be considered. A cloud expert will offer AWS recommended solutions, designed especially for massive migration scenarios to allow smooth, automated processes, reducing downtime and unnecessary resource-investment.

Testing and Validation

Testing should be done shortly before the end of the cloud migration process. Your AWS partner will perform an extensive analysis to ensure all data and applications have been successfully migrated and are functioning properly. Your AWS partner will use reliable evaluation protocols to ensure the smooth transition.

Post-Migration

There is still much to do. The completion of your migration is not, by definition, the end of the journey. The cloud expert should provide the means and guidance for ongoing monitoring and optimization services, assist in building a Cloud Center of Excellence, a small, cloud-related decision making team This is important to ensure that your AWS infrastructure remains secure, efficient, and cost-effective to continually meet your business needs.

Conclusion

Migrating to AWS is a huge milestone for your business. AWS Partners who are migration experts are indispensable in guaranteeing a secure, efficient, and successful transition. Our expertise at Cloudride, as well as our commitment to maintaining rigid security standards, will greatly benefit your organization. If you’re interested in beginning your cloud journey, please book a consultation meeting with one of our cloud migration champions today.

Originally published at https://www.cloudride.co.il.