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Cloud adoption, while not a new phenomenon, is increasingly gaining traction after the COVID pandemic. In 2020, 61% of organizations moved some or all of their workloads to the cloud. And as of 2022, 94% of enterprises are using cloud services. The increase in adoption can be attributed to the need for scalability, flexibility, and continuous innovation.
Do you plan to move your legacy systems to the cloud? Formulating a detailed cloud migration strategy is imperative to seamlessly migrate your data assets and optimize your cloud utilization.
Here are some cloud data migration best practices to help you streamline your cloud migration journey.
Choosing the Right Data Migration Approach
There is more than one approach to undertaking a cloud data migration project. Primarily, most strategies fall into two approaches: big bang and incremental.
In the big bang approach, you move the entire system architecture and all its different environments, including production, staging, and development, at once. After the migration, it results in complete disconnection from the existing communication service provider. In contrast, the incremental approach allows you to complete the migration process in phases.
It’s important to understand your data environment and anticipate the potential issues that you may experience to pick the right approach. Generally, the big bang approach is suitable for simple data migration use cases. On the other hand, the incremental approach is a better choice when dealing with complex and large volumes of data.
Prepare Your Employees and Existing IT Infrastructure
It’s crucial to train employees on the chosen cloud platforms. Due to the level of abstraction introduced by the cloud and its inherently unique design, a series of training sessions for different departments within an organization is necessary.
Moreover, you should prepare the existing IT infrastructure by identifying connections between your services using service maps, arranging resources like servers, and establishing appropriate security, compliance, and governance framework.
Ensure Cloud Security
Establish a governance structure with clear policies to ensure cloud security. Cloud governance entails evaluating inherent risks associated with the data and applications transfer to third-party providers.
An effective cloud governance program entails structures, responsibilities, policies, plans, principles, and a decision framework. It ensures that compliance requirements are met during the migration journey.
Focus On Automation
If you want to increase the success rate of your cloud migration projects and achieve a faster return on investment, then you should automate as much of your journey as possible. Using modern data management solutions that support automated workflows, you can move complex workloads to the cloud without the risk of losing data or experiencing downtime.
Automation also plays a huge role in maintaining data quality during cloud migration as it reduces human error and ensures only clean and consistent data reaches the cloud destination.
Test And Measure Migration Success
The process of cloud migration does not end with the migration. A new cloud setup can only be considered complete once all the current applications and services have been tested and the previous setup is removed or decommissioned.
Incorporating a testing schedule in the cloud migration strategy can be highly beneficial. Once the testing phase is complete, utilize the KPIs established during the goal-setting process to evaluate the project’s short- and long-term success.
Implement Cloud Data Migration
Cloud data migration requires considerable effort and can be a complex endeavor. You need to consider several factors before migrating to the cloud. A comprehensive understanding of all these factors can assist your team in developing the most appropriate strategy according to your organization’s needs and resources.
There is no doubt that the cloud is the future. Moving to the cloud is no longer an advantage but more of a necessity. Cloud data assets allow you to rapidly innovate and scale operations as you grow. More importantly, it helps you enable real-time insights for informed decision-making, so you can stay competitive and maximize your bottom
