Cloud Migration Assessment Best Practices & Considerations

With all of the hype around the cloud, it may seem like you should move all your resources to the cloud as soon as possible, but the reality is that not all workloads benefit equally from a move to the cloud – and some workloads may not benefit at all.  It is essential to do a thorough cloud migration assessment to ensure that you are prioritizing correctly and moving the right pieces of your architecture.

There are many factors to consider for migration success, including your existing data center and technology, application performance, budgets and resources. In addition, whether you are migrating a new application or an entire set of applications for the first time or between clouds, the process can be tricky, especially if this is your first cloud deployment.

The advantages of the cloud are clear and to fully realize those benefits you want to be sure you plan and execute your migration with thought and precision. Plan for your cloud migration by evaluating every aspect of your organization’s IT landscape to ensure you are prepared for the move.

Bandwidth Measurement

Application performance is a critical measure but administrators must first determine the viability of the application in the cloud. While newer applications have been optimized to run on modern operating systems, older legacy applications may not be suitable. And even though the cloud provides unlimited compute and memory resources, internet bandwidth could get in the way.

Bandwidth impact analysis of your WAN, Internet and data center, will give you the best understanding of how the move to the cloud impacts the cost and performance of your infrastructure. Your cloud migration assessment should capture and analyze data from your network to identify the capacity of every component of your infrastructure. This information can then be used to place the distribution of workloads and understand if you require infrastructure or ISP upgrades.

Workload Analysis

Before a cloud migration can take place examine every aspect of your infrastructure and applications to determine the variety and impact of workloads, regardless of whether your deployment is a simple one-off application or a more complex task.

Perform a complete the analysis and generate a written report that provides the complete details of your findings so you know exactly what to expect for performance, timing and determine potential concerns or risk factors. You will need to assess what countermeasures are needed for each risk factor that is uncovered, so the probability of downtime or disruption during the migration can be minimized.

Disaster Recovery Plans

One aspect of IT infrastructure that often gets neglected in both the cloud and on-premise deployments is application resiliency and disaster recovery. Your hosting provider should explain its own plan for disaster recovery, and they should provide you with an SLA to help you to plan yours. Ideally, the plans should dovetail perfectly, ensuring safety in nearly any eventuality.

Your cloud provider needs to have facilities in multiple regions to ensure a degree of safety in the event of natural disasters or terrorist actions. The SLA should spell out how they will backup of your information at various locations, and they should be able to provide information on the maximum and average downtime you could expect in a disaster.  Finally, the DR plan must be spelled out and incorporated into the cost structure of your migration.

Education

Assess the skill set of your IT organization and understand if they have the right training to manage your cloud infrastructure.  After the workload is moved, your IT staff needs to know how to lock it down, operate and manage it, as well as make sure there is a plan to handle problems as they arise. Now is a good time to make sure all your employees are up to speed on the impending changes as well as the operation of your key business applications such as Microsoft Dynamics AX, SAP or Oracle.  Many IT organizations will bring in a managed service provider to smooth the migration until they are sure that they have a plan in place and an educated staff.

OneNeck Cloud Migration Assessment

OneNeck IT Solutions’ cloud assessment and migration services can help take the stress out of deciding what to move to the cloud. After the assessment, the team will provide you with a detailed report and a roadmap for the move, including all the considerations and dependencies in place. After reviewing the assessment report, you will be in an ideal position to implement your cloud deployment strategy. To get started on your cloud migration assessment, contact OneNeck IT Solutions today.