A process to ensure a successful strategy for cloud migration
Cloud migrations entail risks that can impact on businesses – downtime and loss of data being some of the main challenges. However, with cloud adoption on the rise and cloud-based applications becoming increasingly valuable, organisations eventually need to face cloud server migration tasks.
For successful cloud migration, it is vital for the approach used by your cloud migration support partner to include tried and tested best practices and step-by-step methodology to migrate systems and applications from on-premises to the cloud.
The below stages provide organisations with assurance, guidance and governance, to help shape technology, business and people strategies for driving desired business outcomes during the cloud adoption effort.
Define strategy
At this stage, it helps to document your business strategy. By doing this, you drive adoption efforts that capture targeted business value. You can then map your cloud adoption strategy to specific cloud capabilities and business strategies to reach your desired state of transformation.
Plan
When technical implementation is aligned with clear business objectives, it is much easier to measure and align success across multiple cloud implementation efforts, regardless of technical decisions. A practical planning approach captures prioritised tasks to drive adoption efforts. The cloud adoption plan then maps to the metrics and motivations defined in the cloud adoption strategy.
Ready
This part of our cloud migration methodology involves creating a landing zone. A landing zone hosts the workloads that you plan to build in the cloud or migrate to the cloud. We also help you to prepare your business, culture, people and environment for the coming changes. This approach leads to success in each endeavour and accelerates implementation and change projects.
Adopt – migrate and innovate
At this stage, we ensure suitable implementation of desired changes, across IT and business processes, to achieve business outcomes. At its core, migration to the cloud involves four processes – Assess, Migrate, Optimise, and Secure and Manage to create a repeatable process for migrating workloads. During the innovation stage, applications hosted on-premises can be re-written to your requirements. Our approach goes beyond ‘lifting and shifting’ your applications and systems from on-premises to the cloud. We focus on new capabilities made possible by cloud operating models.
Govern and manage
Effective governance runs across our entire cloud migration methodology. We align corporate policy to tangible risks, mitigated through policy, process and cloud-based governance tooling. Cloud governance is an iterative process. For organisations with existing policies that govern on-premises IT environments, cloud governance should complement those policies. As the cloud estate changes over time, so do cloud governance processes and policies. A good governance procedure helps you to align people and teams to deliver proper cloud operations and adoption. Cloud adoption will not succeed without well-organised people. Successful cloud adoption is the result of suitably skilled people doing the appropriate types of work, in alignment with clearly defined business goals and a well-managed environment.
Incremental uses this cloud migration methodology to provide customers with assurance, guidance and governance, to help shape technology, business and people strategies for driving desired business outcomes during the cloud adoption effort.
Our cloud migration methodology aligns to various stages and iterations of the typical cloud adoption lifecycle, ensuring easy access to the right guidance at the right time.