Don’t Overlook These Aspects When You Plan Your Cloud Migration
Planning for the cloud requires taking a comprehensive look at your infrastructure. There’s more to consider than simply migrating data and applications.
Network
The network is perhaps the forgotten component of the cloud, but it’s essential to success in the cloud. Making sure the network can handle the new traffic demands of your cloud architecture is vital to a successful cloud deployment.
Be sure you estimate the bandwidth requirements when you switch to SaaS or move data storage to the cloud. The network needs to meet both capacity and latency requirements.
Security
The network is closely tied with another aspect of infrastructure that’s affected by the move to cloud: security. Your firewall rules need to be adjusted to allow appropriate communication with your cloud infrastructure.
In addition, you need to thoroughly revisit your security strategy. Understand which aspects are handled by your cloud provider, so you can focus your attention on the aspects which are still your responsibility. In particular, focus on ensuring your cloud resources have appropriate configuration settings—the defaults may make data publicly accessible, along with identity and access management. You’ll also want to make certain data is encrypted and have a process for managing the encryption keys.
Learn more in 6 Ways to Keep Your Cloud More Secure.
Monitoring
Although the cloud provider has responsibility for the infrastructure, you still need to need to monitor your workloads to ensure they’re performing appropriately. Cloud providers offer tools for monitoring, and you can also consider third-party monitoring tools. Ideally, your cloud monitoring tool will integrate with your on-premises monitoring so there’s a single screen that reports your total system status. Whatever monitoring you use, your employees need to be trained in how to respond to outages and other problems in the cloud.
Backup & Recovery
Cloud providers include backups that let them recover your systems to another instance in case of a problem, but their backup strategy might not mesh with your data preservation requirements. In addition to potentially losing more intraday data than your recovery objective requires, they don’t create an archive of historic data that you may need for compliance or analytics purposes.
In some cases, responding to an outage requires recovering services elsewhere—despite the high availability that comes with cloud, you still need a backup and recovery solution. This may mean failing over to another region managed by the same provider or failing over to a different cloud provider or on-premises environment.
Learn more about the different cloud options for backup and recovery.
Cloud Migration
Both you and your cloud provider hope the cloud migration will be successful. However, it’s prudent to plan for migrating out of the cloud if the provider can no longer meet your needs. While you don’t need a full-fledged out-migration strategy on the day you switch production over to the cloud, you should have at least investigated it to become aware of the potential costs of data transfers out of the cloud.
CCS Technology Group can help you address all aspects of your cloud planning, as well as provide ongoing cloud services once your cloud migration is complete. Contact us to learn more about successfully transitioning to the cloud.
