How to Execute a Transition to Cloud       

 However, the concept and practices for a cloud transition can be daunting. A successful transition to cloud will have various benefits, such as scalability, cost management, distributed infrastructure, and many more. But how do you execute a transition to cloud

Identifying the reasons why your business would transition to the cloud is easy than you may imagine. Here is how;

1. Define Transition Goals

Transitioning to the cloud requires you to have an understanding of the application that the business is using. Identify the reasons your business wants to transition to the cloud; this makes it easy to choose a transition strategy.

As you identify the goals, determine the workloads that shouldn’t run in the cloud. You can plan the necessary steps to modify such applications to a cloud environment. 

2. Establish Success Criteria

You need to measure the success and failure of cloud practices. Ensure your success criteria align with business goals. The common key performance indicators before and after transition include

  • Availability. Will transition make the product more accessible to your end users?
  • Maintenance cost. Will the maintenance cost of the system decrease after the transition? Include training costs and the system administrators’ fees.
  • Scalability. How will automated performance scalability help you?  

3. Choose a Cloud Provider

Start by identifying your cloud model: public, private, or hybrid. Then examine and compare different cloud providers to choose the best for you. Consider the provider’s experience, reviews from customers, and recommendations. Also, choose a provider that offers quality services at a reasonable price.  

The right services will vary depending on workload. Therefore, consider how easy or hard it is to deploy workloads in the service and how to monitor, manage, and the security risks of the service.

4. Select Automation Tools

Numerous tools make the transition to the cloud easy as they do most complex tasks. With the tools, your transition to the cloud will be faster, lower cost, and have minimal risks.

Automation is mandatory when migrating your components and running performance tests. Your cloud providers have different automation tools, so you should choose the most compatible tool.

5. Pick a Transition Strategy

You can choose from the following transition strategies:

  • Re-host. It involves cloning your servers and moving them to a cloud provider’s infrastructure as a service (IaaS). The strategy can get you into the cloud faster and reduce your capital expenses in the short term.
  • Replatform. It entails transferring your applications to the cloud and modernizing certain parts.
  • Refactor. It is minimally altering existing application code to benefit from cloud capabilities.
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6. Prepare a Backup System

Transitioning to the cloud will require you to prepare a backup plan. It’s a precautionary measure that ensures you don’t lose your data when a problem occurs. You can adopt cloud backup tools and practices from your provider. Also, you should create a data access policy.

7. Transition

After thorough preparations, you can now transition to the cloud. You will move all your data and users into the cloud infrastructure at this stage.

Conclusion

Cloud transition is the biggest trend in many businesses. If you do it right, transition to the cloud will be key to the growth and expansion of your business. If not done right, transition to the cloud might be the downfall of your business. So, ensure you follow the above steps to successfully execute a transition to the cloud.