With digital resilience becoming a key factor for business excellence, more and more enterprises are looking for seamless migration of their legacy systems, servers and databases to the cloud.

Many consultants are helping businesses figure out which cloud vendor and tools are right for their needs. According to IDC, by the end of 2021, 80% of enterprises globally will put a mechanism in place to shift to cloud infrastructure and applications twice as fast as before the pandemic.

List reasons

The first thing companies should ask themselves is if cloud migration is necessary. For that, businesses should jot down the key reasons why they are making the switch. They should find out if the benefits offered by the cloud suits their use cases better than their on-premise setup. Will it help in better communication between remotely working employees? Will it guarantee better security? Will it reduce the cost? The answer to many such questions will help them choose the right cloud provider. 

Choose the cloud model

First, you have to look at which cloud model you will work for: private, public, or hybrid.

Private cloud

• You will require dedicated infrastructure, either on-premises or it can be managed by a third-party provider.  
• You can deploy applications on dedicated hardware in your private network. 
• You will need a team of experts in the networking and storage domain.

Public cloud

• Public clouds are managed by a third party. 
• It is easy and the company need not create their own software. 
• This brings down the cost but offers lesser data security
• Also, if the company has any specific need, this may not work as public cloud providers have only standard options. 

Hybrid cloud

A hybrid cloud combines your private cloud with a public cloud.

• This is for businesses who cannot migrate one or a few of the applications to the public cloud.
• It is scalable as non-critical operations can be moved to public and sensitive data on a private cloud.
• However, there could be challenges during data transmission between public and private cloud models. 
• Additionally, many hybrid cloud users also feel a lack of control. 

Cost evaluation

Once you decide on the cloud model, decide on the cost of all the resources that you plan to provision. You can use monthly calculators offered by cloud providers to evaluate the pricing of all the services you will be using. And, if cost is the primary reason you are opting for cloud migration, you can check how much savings you can make. 

Security policies

There are many regulations surrounding cloud migration. This is more pertinent to businesses in healthcare and fintech. So, before you start your migration process, ensure you can comply with all government regulations. Also, you can start the process of determining the team members who would be given access to cloud data. This will help you minimise data breach risk. 

Choose the right cloud provider

Once you have decided to go for cloud migration, choosing the right cloud provider is important. Amazon Web Services (AWS), Microsoft Azure, Google Cloud Platform, IBM Cloud, Salesforce and SAP are popular cloud providers globally. 

The cloud provider should align with your business goals, and to know that, you have to collect the following info:

• Experience 
• Total number of customers
• Customer redressal
• Brands using it
• Quality of data centres
• Size and experience of the engineering team
• Data safety
• Capacity to manage updates and patches

Train your team

Bringing your team, especially the team that will be directly involved in the migration, together and training them is important to know if you need to hire any cloud migration specialist or not. You will be able to determine if your existing team can make the process seamless or would need an extra hand. 

Disaster recovery 

Having a disaster recovery plan is an extremely important but often ignored part of cloud migration. Choosing the right disaster recovery region is important too. You have to look at the cost and distance from the current region. You can choose either backup and restore or pilot light strategy or warm standby or multi-site strategy in case of automatic failover to a different region for your internet-facing application.