Cloud transformation is critical because it is how modern businesses operate. Every company should prioritize keeping up with the fast-paced business environment and market changes. At the same time, organizations should stay current with how other businesses work within such environments. Increasingly, this means using the best cloud computing practices. 83% of companies’ workloads are currently in the cloud, and Cybersecurity Ventures’ research suggests that by 2025, the cloud will gather more than 100 zettabytes of data. In this scenario, any business not using the power of the cloud will struggle to match the competition.
Cloud transformation is moving business data, software, and applications from on-premises to the cloud. Consider it a subset of digital transformation commonly used to reduce costs, increase business process efficiency and streamline operations. Each company will have its path toward cloud transformation, but each journey will not follow the same process. On that note, the time your company takes to complete the cloud transformation process will depend on your business size, your team’s readiness, and the results you want to achieve. Here is a basic guide you need to use to achieve your cloud transformation objective.
Table of Contents
Determine Your Business Objective
Know what is your main objective behind transforming to the cloud. Are you opting for cloud transformation to improvise team collaborations, more work agility, faster time to market, or for enhanced security? Although all the above reasons are the main advantages of cloud transformation, selecting the main goal is critical in choosing the right cloud partners and starting with the entire cloud transformation procedure.
A detailed look at your software, data, and applications will help you understand your requirements and why you are transforming to the cloud. This can further help you understand your capacity requirements and the cost model you need to adopt.
Analyze Your Options
You need to make a confident choice when trying to choose between PaaS, SaaS, and IaaS partnerships. Remember, every business is different, and so is yours. Therefore, at this stage, understand the cloud functionality that can solve your organization’s pain points.
Define Workload Dependencies
The use of a single app can impact how users leverage other apps. Therefore, look for areas where cloud technology can create efficiencies and connections unavailable in non-cloud solutions.
Consider this example of making a call. This might appear to be a simple process where you call an individual, have a conversation, and then hang up. The process is the same whether you use a mobile phone, landline, or cloud communications app. But what happens after this call? Both customer support executives and sales agents need to log the call to maintain proper account history. This happens manually on landline calls, with agents switching to their CRMs and manually typing out the call report for every single call.
Conversely, communication solutions integrated with CRM automatically log calls, notes, and transcripts, saving the executives hours of extra effort. So, workload interdependencies into account that may impact regular workflows when taking up cloud transformation.
Choose Your Cloud Partner
Currently, the market is overflowing with cloud providers. The majority of them, especially the most popular ones, are known to offer solid solutions. Nevertheless, your choice will not depend on the providers’ popularity but on their services’ efficacy in meeting your main objective behind cloud transformation. You even have the choice to go for multi-cloud solutions based on your requirements.
Come Up With a Good Cloud Strategy
Defining a solid and convenient cloud strategy will help you migrate to the cloud as securely and seamless as possible. However, take several steps to get to the right cloud strategy. First, assess your existing applications to select the most suitable cloud transformation model for each. You can do this automatically or manually and use different cloud assessment solutions. Such tools will help you acquire a holistic view of the assets and the relationship they share.
Some important aspects you need to pay special attention to when performing an application assessment are as follows:
- Understand each application’s architecture. You must do this for both internally developed applications and those that are off-the-shelf. Also, consider their dependencies with other interfaces, applications, and hardware.
- Examine data sensitivity. Understand whether data contains personal details or is classified and whether data can stay on the public cloud or needs to be hosted in other areas. Once done with this, determine the security level to safeguard the same.
- Understand the significance of each application. Determine whether a certain application should be up and running 24/7 and how downtime of a certain application can impact business.
Following these steps will help you determine the applications that can be migrated to the cloud and then have a proper migration strategy for each.
Work on a Proper Disaster Recovery Plan
Have a well-thought-of and solid disaster recovery plan in place. Recovery and backup work by copying processes, applications, and data to create a continuous backup when things go wrong. The right data recovery plan will minimize downtime and ensure faster recovery whenever your organization faces problems. You must plan disaster recovery along with cloud hosting and transformation. You must enable it when your applications and data are on the cloud and should not disable it at any point.
Test Everything
Finally, you must test everything. Of course, if anything can go wrong, it surely will, but that does not mean you must leave them untested. Testing everything means coming up with a checklist before cloud transformation and then going from one point to another over the different tasks. This must start from the most critical tasks to the least critical ones. By doing so, you can ensure every step of the cloud transformation plan is appropriately tested before moving to the next one.
It’s a Wrap!
Cloud transformation is not a passing trend; it is here to stay and how companies will be doing business soon. The benefits of cloud transformation are undeniable. Of course, the entire procedure can be confusing, with several terms being used incorrectly and interchangeably. But cloud transformation will be easier to achieve when you follow the above steps religiously.
