Irrespective of the size of the organization, migrating to the cloud comes with certain challenges. Business and IT leaders have several important decisions to make during the process, including which applications to migrate and how to successfully connect such activities to their specific business use cases.

Some of the important things you can do for a seamless cloud migration include –

1. Mapping Out a Detailed Migration Strategy

It is of paramount importance to begin by mapping out a detailed migration strategy that outlines both use cases and business objectives to move to the cloud. One of the best ways to approach cloud migration is to either do it in phases or by launching a pilot migration with less critical workloads to gain the experience and expertise to be able to move forward with a larger migration strategy.

2. Train Your Staff Adequately

Lack of expertise or skills gap is one of the main barriers that enterprises face when it comes to cloud migration. This makes it important to train your employees in chosen cloud platforms in the early phase of the migration process. Since the public cloud systems are inherently different in design from that of the internal IT infrastructure of most businesses, it makes sense to organize training sessions early on to get staff across different teams up to speed in public cloud concepts.

3. Identify and Understand Workloads

Workloads typically include all the enterprise applications and their supporting ecosystems. For a successful cloud migration, you need to identify and understand whether the existing workload is suitable for the cloud, and that is dependent on the application and its supporting ecosystem. One of the ways to better understand workloads is by correlating applications and infrastructure performance.

4. Create a Robust Cloud Governance Framework

Security and compliance are some of the major concerns that organizations have when moving to the cloud. This makes it essential to develop a robust cloud governance framework with well-defined, policy-based rules to help organizations prepare for secure cloud migration. Cloud governance strategy that you design should take into account the inherent risks of trusting data and apps to third-party services. Further, it should include various tools, policies, objectives, and measures to allow your enterprise to migrate to the cloud with minimal risk and maximum value.

5. Network Management

Another great practice for seamless cloud migration is to design cloud architecture before starting the process of migration and map the resources to their respective areas. Organizations need to make sure that the resources are mapped to the same domain name, and clear and precise communication is sent to all the stakeholders involved to avoid any kind of confusion.

6. Proper Monitoring and Governance

It is extremely important to carefully examine and monitor the end-to-end process of cloud migration, as well as the post-migration phase. Monitoring and governance play a crucial role in the process of migration as applications might behave differently than they did in the data center because of changes in the architecture components. While monitoring, everything from the system, application, network, and audit trails should be captured and examined along with the data from the monitoring dashboard to find a correlation between various components and identify the areas to be improved for better functionality.