According to a recent study, more than 90% of the businesses have some part of their IT environment in the cloud, and only 8% report having all of their IT resources on-premises. So if your business isn’t using cloud services, chances are it soon will be.
As businesses use cloud migration services to accelerate decision-making, create superior customer experience, improve processes and workflows and develop more revenue streams, the cloud can act as a catalyst. It can help position the machine-first approach and enable businesses to automate the business processes and harness massive computing power on demand at a reduced cost than traditional computing architectures. Nowadays, the cloud has evolved into a critical computing resource for businesses to create disruptive models and achieve flexibility, affordability, and scalability.
Statistically, spending on cloud services will reach a whopping $397.5 billion. In addition, the cloud also has the potential to generate between $100 billion and $170 billion in revenue for healthcare companies by 2030. Cloud migration strategy offered by service providers in remote data centers, cloud technology has become the cornerstone of digital transformation for businesses. Businesses must migrate to the cloud and their legacy system to remain competitive. Joining a cloud migration platform requires a series of strategic steps as mentioned below:
5 Strategic Steps Businesses Must Follow for a Profitable Digital Transformation
The key steps that are necessary for a successful cloud migration strategy are as follows:
Create a goal-based cloud migration strategy:
Businesses are ready to develop cloud migration strategies based on their future requirements and current IT infrastructure and capabilities. However, today’s competitive environment does not allow complacent businesses caught in inertia to survive. Before performing cloud migration, businesses should perform a cloud migration readiness assessment to understand their competitive position, determine their migration goals, and analyze their strengths and weaknesses. For instance, they must decide whether to achieve business agility, strengthen security to minimize risks, reduce reliance on traditional systems, convert CapEx to OpEx, or move to a DevOps approach.
However, before committing to one or more of the above options, businesses need to ensure their strategy is business-driven and developed in collaboration with real stakeholders. It is essential to consider that the results of cloud migration tests and how they should be measured should be established upfront. To develop a robust test approach for cloud migration, businesses should engage the services of experts to help prioritize and include necessary elements.
Calculate the overall cost of the migration
Leaving traditional systems in uncharted territory can be very risky. Therefore, while developing cloud migration solutions, businesses must identify risk factors and address them early. It is recommended to consider that transition to a cloud-based operating environment may be more expensive than expected. It may even turn out that after a comprehensive risk assessment for cloud migration, businesses may find it challenging or impractical to migrate specific workloads to the cloud. This can happen after a substantial investment while setting up the hardware infrastructure and purchasing software licenses. In addition, traditional software may be required to be reconfigured or redesigned before performing cloud migration.
Also, modern cloud-based processes may require hiring additional staff. To determine the overall cost of migration, businesses must break it down into individual items, such as data center operating costs, network bandwidth costs, and disaster recovery costs. It is recommended to create price estimates for your cloud configuration. However, before justifying the cost, it is recommended to consider the compelling reasons for migrating to the cloud, namely remote access, geographical distribution, agility, and scalability.
Determine the things to migrate
Firstly, it should be clear that not everything that corresponds to IT infrastructure or management can be migrated. This is regardless of the unprecedented expansion of cloud architecture. Therefore businesses must create an inventory of applications, processes, and data and assess their suitability for performing cloud migration. For example, it is irrelevant to move non-core and non-standard applications incompatible with the cloud environment. It is recommended to carefully evaluate each legacy system and its capabilities to check if they need to be migrated to the cloud. In addition, it should also be determined whether the assets provide the intended benefits of migrating to the cloud.
Choose the right cloud configuration:
After choosing the applications and databases to migrate to the cloud, businesses must determine the right cloud migration strategy to achieve their end goals. For example, a hybrid cloud model with an on-premises application may provide optimal results for specific organizations. Moreover, each configuration can deliver significant uptime, control, security, and scalability benefits.
Integrate cloud migration automation:
Cloud migration automation can significantly reduce manual effort while addressing skills, productivity, and consumption gaps. Automation efforts can easily include core areas such as installation, code patching, and cloud service management. Businesses can effortlessly achieve minimal disruption during cloud migration by automating the migration efforts.
Wrapping Up
Any comprehensive cloud migration and post-operational preparation require a solid cloud migration strategy. In addition, it also requires collaborating with cloud migration services providers for strategic planning, cultural transformation, and technical transition to reap the benefits of flexibility, agility, innovation, and scalability.
