Your Step by Step Guide to Cloud Transformation

If you ask us when is the right time to move to the cloud, we would say about a year ago. The next best time? Now.

Each year, more and more enterprises are moving their premises to the cloud by migrating their data, applications, processes and software. This particularly grew after the covid lockdowns, forcing businesses to rethink their work models and find viable solutions to sustain their operations.

However, cloud transformation doesn’t happen at the click of a button. It’s a strategic decision that covers your migration plan, as well as how you envision remodeling your entire IT infrastructure.

Here are the steps you need to follow to ensure a proper and successful cloud transformation:

Define your business objective

What is your main reason for migrating to the cloud? Is it for better team collaborations, enhanced security, more work agility or faster time to market?

Although the above are all benefits of cloud transformation, choosing the main objective is key in knowing which cloud partner to select and how to approach your entire migration.

Assess your migration needs

A closer look at your data, applications and software will allow you to know what your needs are, and what you are exactly migrating to the cloud. This is essential in understanding your capacity requirements, as well as the cost model you will adopt.

Select your go-to cloud partner

There are many cloud providers out there. Most of them, especially the renowned ones like AWS, Google Cloud and Microsoft Azure are very solid and extremely popular. However, your choice will not only rely on popularity. You will need to select the one that answers the most your main objective. You may even go for a multi-cloud solution, depending on your needs.

Ideally, and to save you the hassle of viewing each provider’s requirements, you can partner with a cloud managed service provider like kloudr, who will work on understanding your needs and matching you with the right cloud provider.

Set the priorities for your migration

Determine what goes first in your migration plan. Data and applications with the least dependencies are the best ones to start with. Then follow up with more critical data and services. Finally, go for the outermost services. These are the ones most linked to customer data and service, and are considered the most critical ones.

Establish a solid disaster recovery plan

Implement a solid and well-thought of data recovery plan. Backup and recovery work by replicating your data, applications and processes to create a constant backup in case something goes wrong. And whenever you do face problems, cloud disaster recovery will minimize downtime and ensure a fast recovery.

Disaster recovery should be planned along with your cloud migration and hosting. It should be enabled the second your data and applications are on the cloud and should at no point be disabled.

Test everything

Finally, test everything. As the saying goes “if anything can go wrong, it will”. So things will go wrong if you leave them untested and this is not something you want your business operations to face.

Testing means putting up a checklist prior to the migration, and going point by point over the tasks, from most critical to least critical, and making sure every step of the migration plan is properly tested before moving to the next.