So, when you have decided you need to migrate to the cloud, that is great! Cloud migration will help take your business, application, and you to the next level. To make sure things go right for your cloud migration, I have created a step-by-step plan and checklist to help you in your cloud migration journey.

Cloud Migration Planning

We have discussed various cloud migration strategies and for successful cloud migration, a step-by-step plan should be adopted to validate everything is working properly. Here are the points you should take care of while crafting your cloud migration plan.

• Identify the use, requirements, and architectural concepts of the platform and how to deliver.
• You need to decide what cloud environment model you need to adopt. It can be a hybrid cloud, private cloud, or public cloud and it should be decided considering your current and future roadmap.
• You should go through the security concerns when you are migrating your application and its data, you need to comply with the security policies and planning or data recovery or backup.
• Your migration plan should include a project roadmap, project metrics and services. What is going to affect and who will be most affected by making such changes from the migration, all these things should be included.

Once the planning is in place, next is the checklist which will help you track the progress.

Cloud Migration Checklist

A checklist needs to be prepared, so that it can help in tracking all the necessary transitions and we can check if all our tasks are completed or not. To help organizations we have finalized some crucial areas needed to be considered for an effective cloud migration journey.

• Classify the workloads you need to migrate to the cloud, classify as per their size and complexity
• Study and finalize the cloud service provider that is suitable for your workloads/applications
• Choose whether you want to go for a multi-cloud or single cloud approach
• Determine the cost for cloud migration
• Establishing a team and a lead role to execute a cloud migration task
• Regularly communicating with the team about cloud migration goals
• Estimating how much migration process can be handled by the internal team and how much to outsource
• Make a list of workloads to be uploaded from most to least important
• A plan to be prepared that outlines the roadmap and initiate the migration
• Check if your organization is already using any cloud-based application and check if they want to replace to the new cloud services or want to remain on the same
• Communication is a must. You should communicate to your stakeholder what to look forward after the migration
• A proper security plan should be prepared when the migration is completed
• Establish cloud migration KPIs
• Review the complete process, check everything is implemented as per the requirement
• Test and review your application properly if it is not as per your requirement then ask for adjustment as per your need

Following this plan and checklist, you will be able to plan strategically for your possible issues that will help you avoid challenges and unnecessary hurdles in the migration journey. Alternatively, you can find a partner that can turn your cloud migration plan into a reality.

A Case Study