6 Strategic Steps of Cloud Migration for Successful Digital Transformation

Assessment of Cloud Readiness: The First Step Towards Cloud Migration

When talking about digital transformation, cloud technology plays an important role and can truly bring transformation from top to bottom. Before moving towards the cloud, the following elements of cloud readiness must be considered:

• Current Technology: Platform, applications, infrastructure, and data.
• Technology Team Readiness: Whether the entire technology team is ready to begin deploying and supporting cloud solutions for operations or not?
• Functional Readiness: Whether all the individual functional areas of the technology group possess basic skills, focus, funding, and time to start the company’s journey to the cloud?

Gartner predicts that 28% percent of spending within key enterprise IT markets will shift to the cloud by 2022. The healthcare sector is now leading on cloud adoption as compared to its contemporaries. According to McKinsey, cloud capabilities have the potential to generate the value of $100 billion to $170 billion in 2030 for healthcare companies.

5 Primary Approaches of Incorporating Cloud Culture in Enterprises

A step towards cloud migration counts on management and the team to understand the importance of cloud, and then they must ask important practices and questions of a company before migration. Cloud’s flexibility and speed, help companies quickly test and replicate specific use cases, such as expanding services, personalizing customer service, and more.

1. Embedding Cloud in Core Strategic Discussions: The cloud, as part of a holistic digital transformation, must be integrated into core strategic discussions and with proper guidance.
2. Technical Leadership: Enterprises must create a cloud culture and invest time in guiding the team so that team members can understand the tools and scenarios which will be required in early iterations.

Securing Configuration of Systems and Applications: Companies must seek to ensure the risk mitigation plans or cloud security before approving cloud-related strategies. Security-as-code (SaC) is a method of codifying security and policy decisions that are stored and automatically incorporated in the CI/CD pipeline to continuously detect vulnerabilities and bugs.

5 Step Plan for Successful Cloud Migration

However, migrating large numbers of legacy applications to the cloud can sometimes be intimidating for organizations due to the sheer scale of the changes required. The 6 successful strategies that companies should consider before migrating towards the cloud are:

1. Assessment of Cloud Readiness: Evaluating applications and workloads for cloud readiness enables organizations to determine which applications and data can and cannot easily migrate to the environment.
2. Choose Level of Cloud Integration: Cloud integration is a system of tools and technologies that connect various applications, systems, repositories, and IT environments to exchange data and processes in real-time. Cloud integration disrupts data, improves connectivity and transparency, and ultimately streamlines business processes.
3. Identify and Address Security Challenge: However, IT security practices are still new to many organizations, leaving their network infrastructure and evolving systems vulnerable to cybersecurity breaches that could reveal their identity online. They cannot keep up with innovation and growth opportunities due to their security.

This issue affects companies more broadly, as longer and more expensive development cycles mean that there is no room for business expansion. Security practices like SaC must be implemented to protect the cloud structure.

Migrate to Cloud: It’s always better to start migration with services that have the fewest dependencies on the cloud hence the internal services must be moved first and then the outermost service or one which is closest to customers.

After migration, automating the cloud can address consumption, productivity, and skill gaps, and leverage technology to reduce manual effort. Automation can eliminate problems not only by automating the migration effort but also by simplifying the process, resulting in minimal application disruption.

Unfolding New Capabilities with Cloud Adoption

Cloud computing allows organizations to operate in a more experimental manner. This freedom allows an organization to “test” a new solution without a long-term impact on infrastructure costs.

Cloud computing largely “reuses” critical resources to accelerate the deployment of new solutions. This is another change in thinking required in our conventional model to validate new solutions. If an organization decides to make these capabilities available to its internal users, a robust plan must be developed before implementation. This is why most technology organizations are actively starting to implement the cloud which will need a change in traditional thinking.