Three Factors to consider before Migrating to the Cloud

Before determining whether the cloud is the right place for your workloads, you should consider some of the following factors:

1.What are my biggest concerns?

66%[1] of IT professionals list security as their number one concern in moving to the cloud. Individuals who are new to enterprise cloud solutions often hold the belief that their data will be less safe in the cloud than stored in their on-premises solution. This couldn’t be further from the truth! All of the platforms that Carbon60 recommends, including AWS and Azure, undergo thorough 3rd party audits to ensure security. These solutions are well-architected to guarantee security in the cloud is properly configured and proactively monitored.

2.Who do I have on my in-house team?

By nature, migrating to the cloud involves a certain amount of training. There’s an inherent mind shift in the transition, and this comes naturally to some team members more than others. Before beginning, you’ll need to take an accurate inventory of your team, and identify the most open-minded of the bunch. These will be your champions during the process, encouraging the others along as the training commences and new procedures on the cloud are rolled out.

3.Why do I want to migrate to the cloud?

While the answer here may be as straight forward as, “I’m at the end of a contract with our incumbent provider” or, “My hardware has reached end of life and I want to explore new options”, other common answers include downsized human resources, mergers and acquisitions, and the desire to lower costs. While all of these reasons are valid, you’ll need to take a long, hard look at your intentions if your answer boils down strictly to cost savings. A study from 451 Research found that while 38.8% of CIOs list cost savings as their primary reason for cloud migration, cost quickly becomes the number one pain point post-migration.

Sure, cloud solutions have a lower up-front capital investment, but cloud becomes an operating expense postmigration and can creep up over time. In many cases, the desire to overuse the system without budgeting or shadow IT accelerating cloud consumption results in hefty charges that can take a big bite out of the yearly spend. Clearly ensuring that you’ve reviewed and discussed cloud usage with all team leaders who may or may not require access down the road is an important step in the decision-making process around overall solution costing. A managed cloud service provider can also develop governance models to help manage the usage and shield against overruns

Carbon60, a managed service provider, takes a unique approach to the cloud migration process, acting as a partner to their clients every step of the way. The organization seeks to understand the clients’ needs, educate them on the available solutions, and gradually complete the migration process in a manner that decreases risk, empowers team members to absorb the necessary knowledge about the new platform, and make adjustments to the program over time as the business grows. First, and most importantly, Carbon60 takes the time to ask the hard questions, thoroughly weighing the client’s options to determine if a cloud migration is indeed the right solution for them at the current time.

Learn more, download our article: A Successful Journey to the Cloud is Taken Step-By-Step

[1] Forbes, https://www.forbes.com/sites/louiscolumbus/2018/01/07/83-ofenterprise-workloads-will-be-in-the-cloud-by-2020/