It should come as no surprise that since the start of the COVID pandemic, the way that companies work has changed. Today, organizations are supporting a more dynamic, dispersed workforce powered by cloud services. As a result, end users gain an environment that is as robust as their experience in the on-prem office location, allowing them to access the file services and relevant databases that they need and providing the same or higher security than they had before.
Research the advantages of migrating your data
As your organization researches the advantages of migrating your data from your on-prem environments into the cloud, take the time to think about and act on these issues:
- Review your IT infrastructure and understand what you have. Perform an analysis of your existing IT resources and assets and figure out how your staff uses your environment. It’s a great opportunity to go through your servers, assess your approach, re-inventory your assets, and decide the future of your data. You can take the opportunity to consolidate equipment and applications, and determine how to move forward. Above all, make sure that your end-solution matches what your company needs in terms of technology, resilience, and reliability.
- Know that cloud is not always cheaper. While there are opportunities for your company to realize cost savings, also understand that migrating to and leveraging the cloud carries with it, its own expense. There are benefits that usually outweigh those costs, including dependability and better, more streamlined management. These benefits often result in a reduction of staffing levels and other monetary savings. If you are knowledgeable and informed, you can reduce costs while improving your uptime and reliability of the actual services.
- Understand your strategy. Know your priorities in terms of moving to the cloud and running it efficiently. As each usage of cloud has a cost to it, running things in the cloud in an effective manner is obviously very important. Only use and run what you need to in this environment. Be smart, migrate what makes sense for your business and your bottom line
Moving forward with your cloud migration
Each migration is very different, but all follow the same general approach. Here are some tips:
- Start with analyzing what you have and coming up with a strategy of what it is you want to move into the cloud and what your plan is in terms of the services that you need high availability on.
- Know what, if any, services will remain on-premise.
- Break down things like applications that you have and determine whether you want to move them to be pure cloud applications.
- Go through your file servers and weed out files that are very old as you might not want to move them to the cloud and instead might want to archive them.
- Don’t be afraid to redesign things as part of your migration plan.
- Make sure you have good backups of everything–yes, everything.
- Install the appropriate agents and tools to pick your services up and move them up into the cloud.
- Make sure that you still have connectivity to everything, perform testing, and migrate.
If you have any questions about crafting your migration plan, give the CyberSheath team a call. Having an expert help you analyze what you have currently, and come up with a solid plan to determine how or where you’re going to move things, whether to a data center, keeping it on-prem, or moving it to the cloud, can provide the necessary knowledge and assurance your company needs to have a successful migration. Contact us to get started.