The Top Ten Most Important Cloud Migration Assessment Considerations

The Top Ten Most Important Cloud Migration Assessment Considerations

The first part of every cloud migration project is cloud migration assessment. This step is critical; without a good assessment, your company could struggle to achieve actual cost, agility, and scalability benefits. In worst cases, cloud migration could introduce security risks and have negative impacts on your company.

In this article, we will talk about the top ten cloud migration assessment considerations that help us understand your current environment and your IT needs. Let's dive in!

1. Local Data Center

Certain companies have specific legal and compliance requirements for customer data location. The data must be held in the country where the company resides. In those situations, we recommend using the local cloud solution such as our 'Enterprise Cloud' with datacenters in Zagreb and Osijek for Croatian customers and Vienna for Austrian customers.

2. Cloud Security

As a very security-aware company, we take a lot of time to understand your company's security needs. Certain companies have rigorous security requirements that must be satisfied; other companies lack proper security controls. For these companies, cloud migration is an excellent opportunity to implement better security policies and achieve a greater level of security.

Many companies believe that by adopting the cloud, they are compromising their security. This is a big misconception; global cloud providers such as AWS invest millions of dollars into satisfying the most strict security requirements intended for top security workloads.

3. Availability and Cloud Resilience

Even though many cloud providers talk about their commitment to resilience, the cheaper solutions are more prone to outages/incidents. By understanding your availability, we can determine the best cloud provider based on your needs. In specific cases, certain non-critical parts of your infrastructure could be moved to the cheaper but less resilient cloud. Other, more critical parts could be kept inside a proven cloud solution with high availability.

4. Data Storage Needs

With the rise of smart devices, we see an increase in data storage needs. No matter how critical, data needs to have a finite storage timeframe with an active archival policy. Companies must define their data storage and capacity requirements to ensure the right size of the storage solution. Unused data and data that is not legally required should be permanently removed. Cloud storage is expensive, and we must consider that storage is not an abundantly available resource.

5. CI/CD Tools

Cloud changes the way we interact with infrastructure. Instead of manually provisioning servers and deploying software, the cloud platform must be compatible with continuous integration and delivery tools. These tools eliminate repeatable and error-prone manual tasks and ensure environment consistency over different environments.

6. Auditing

With the rapid growth of cloud providers, there are huge variations in each provider's quality and compliance. If your company has specific security and compliance requirements, we must ensure that the cloud provider can offer the service that aligns with these particular requirements. Independent auditors must be able to check the level of service quality, security and overall service management processes to check if the solution complies with the regulatory requirements.

7. Wide Range of Services

While the local cloud providers can help you keep your system and data locally, sometimes their solutions do not offer the range of specialized services such as global cloud providers. If your needs can not be satisfied with the local cloud providers, global providers such as AWS offer virtually unlimited options for any use case or any workload.

8. Adaptability

Cloud providers such as AWS have excellent frameworks for service implementation. AWS's Well-Architected framework ensures cost control, operational excellence, performance efficiency, and reliability. Even though there are very clear guidelines, there are virtually unlimited options to adapt to specific requirements.

Every company is different; the cloud provider must be able to adapt to satisfy your specific needs. In the assessment phase, we need to identify the level of customization and adaptability your company needs; certain cloud providers simply do not offer the adaptability you need.

9. Portability

In an ideal world, your company must be able to port out, migrate, or switch cloud providers when needed. This is the case when we talk about generic migrations such as virtual machine migration. Cloud providers such as AWS offers specialized services that provide an incomparable level of performance compared to traditional solutions. We can compare conventional database solutions and AWS's database solutions that provide 3 to 5 times better performance. The downside of these solutions is the coupling with the cloud provider.

10. SLA

Cloud migration should not compromise existing operational and maintenance SLA's for any organization. In the assessment, we need to identify your SLA requirements and find the cloud provider that is able to provide the inline with your SLA.

Conclusion

In this article, we talked about cloud migration assessment considerations. Cloud migration assessment is an essential step in every cloud journey; it is usually a technical workshop. The length of the workshop depends on the size of the infrastructure. The goal is to understand the whole IT landscape, current pain points, and future needs. Based on the input gathered on the workshop, our team creates the 'current state' document with the scheme of the current infrastructure. Based on this document, our technical team designs the new solution where all needs and pain points are addressed.

As AWS Advanced Consulting Partner, we help companies of every industry and size solve their infrastructure problems with cloud migration.

If you want to know more about cloud migration, cloud technology in general, AWS cloud, or you want to try AWS services:

• visit our cloud migration service page;
• give us a call at +385 1 3141 562;
• contact our sales department at sales@heptabit.com.

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