Benefits of migrating to the cloud

Migrating to the cloud, when properly planned and executed, can bring many benefits to your organization. The cloud streamlines and simplifies many of the infrastructure, business process, and computing resource management issues that companies face with enterprise systems. 

Here’s how to make the most of your cloud migration. 

How cloud migration impacts IT efforts

A thorough cloud migration plan improves the likelihood of success with your investment. If your cloud migration isn’t scoped properly, you’re less likely to be proactive and find challenges early and these hidden problems could cost you later. Carefully consider the impact of cloud migration on the overall work of your IT team to get the most benefit. 

• Prepare before the migration: Before you start the migration, you’ll need to gather your team, outline an effective plan, and ensure your migration will meet the goals you’ve set. 
• Craft a strong strategy: Planning ahead with a cloud migration strategy allows your team to efficiently solve problems that may come up once the process begins. 
• Consider the costs: Cloud migration can be an expensive undertaking. Prevent unwelcome budget surprises by accounting for all costs ahead of time. 
• Match your business needs: Keep your organization’s needs in mind as you research vendors and begin the migration process itself. 
• Have the right team: Find the right people to help your team navigate the cloud migration. This might include cloud consultants who have extensive experience managing cloud migration projects.

Cloud migration strategies

There are a few different types of migration approaches to consider. Which one is right for your organization depends largely on what you hope to accomplish with your cloud migration. 

Migrating as-is with a “lift and shift” migration 

In a lift and shift migration, your organization moves data and workloads to the cloud as-is with little to no changes. Any changes you do make with a lift and shift migration are designed to allow your workloads to perform properly in the new cloud environment and aren’t part of modernization or efforts to significantly modify or refactor your cloud components. 

This approach is best if you’re happy with the current state of the workloads and databases you’re migrating to the cloud and only want to change to a cloud environment. If you have a lot of technical debt you don’t want to see carried over into your new cloud-based systems, then your organization would probably be better off choosing a different strategy. 

You may also be better off without lift and shift if you have other dependencies or system needs to consider, such as legacy software that’s essential today and will be modernized later. 

Update with an “improve and move” migration 

For systems that could benefit from some modernization, an improve and move migration can empower your organization to take advantage of newer technologies and leverage the potential of cloud-native tools. Some advantages and benefits of cloud migration are only practical for organizations that have current, cloud-based architectures and design, making it more difficult for legacy systems to reap the benefits cloud services offer. 

Because you’d be refactoring and modernizing your cloud components, an improve and move migration may take longer than a lift and shift migration. Your team may also need different skills and you may have to recruit new team members with migration expertise. 

Redesign with “rip and replace” cloud migration

If you realize that you’ll need to completely start over before your cloud migration, then a rip and replace migration may be best for your organization’s needs. Instead of fixing your systems or bringing them into the cloud as-is, a rip and replace migration involves designing and creating brand new software without carrying over existing systems. 

Aside from the time and expense associated with a rip and replace migration, your organization would also have to make a lot of new decisions about how you’ll use these systems in the cloud. 

Benefits of cloud migration 

Migrating to the cloud offers many benefits for your business. Some or all of these benefits could be transformational for your team. 

Streamline your business

Improved cost management and cost-effectiveness: Shift the costs involved with your infrastructure from capital expenditures (CapEx) to operational expenditures (OpEx) through your cloud migration. 

Hardware can reach obsolescence quickly, making it harder for organizations to fully realize the financial investment they make in purchasing their own on-premises infrastructure. With the cloud, you can just pay for what you actually use and avoid carrying sole financial responsibility for the infrastructure your company uses. 

Less infrastructure complexity and reduced footprint: Because your team will likely have less infrastructure to manage once you shift to the cloud, they can focus on other tasks. And since the cloud allows you to automate processes, you don’t have to worry about allocating your resources manually. 

Gain flexibility

Faster deployment: Automation can help teams speed-up deployment. With the right cloud toolkit and development culture, your team can bring software to market quickly and efficiently. 

Scalability: Dynamically adjusting your cloud service to your usage will make it that much easier to scale your cloud environment as your business grows. The cloud allows you to keep your computing resources in line with business growth, product release cycles, and other usage changes that your organization experiences. 

Improved work-life balance: Less on-site time means greater flexibility for the people behind your organization. With this, your team could offer greater work-life balance for new recruits, or at the very least adapt more effectively to change. 

Greater agility for the organization: Migrating to the cloud enhances your team’s potential to remain nimble and agile in the face of customer demands and market changes.  

Enhance security and monitoring capabilities

Enhance security: Cloud services can help with some of the more significant security issues and create greater protection for organizational resources. 

Built-in status monitoring: Your cloud provider’s central management tool increases visibility into key monitoring processes. Troubleshoot outages and see where potential bottlenecks may occur. You can also use a tool such as Lucidchart to monitor your cloud. 

Automatic backup and logging of key metrics: Backup information automatically so you have a restoration point if you need it. With logging, you can more readily back-track if necessary to help with determining what went wrong.  

Disaster recovery: By having multi-site availability, your organization is more prepared to recover quickly in the face of disasters big and small. 

Zero risk failure: Your cloud provider can immediately shift service over to other geographic regions, different equipment, or other different environments to maintain uptime. 

Getting started with the cloud migration process 

Visualization is key to simplifying and streamlining your cloud migration. By gaining visibility into your computing environment, you can more effectively plan and control your outcomes. 

With Lucidspark, you can visualize your computing resources and navigate the complexities of cloud migration. Start by coming together as a team to map out your cloud migration goals and define your migration priorities. This will help your team determine what it will take to successfully migrate and get you started on the right foot.