COVID-19 Crisis: Cloud Migration on Demand, Planning is Crucial!

By Veritis

Cloud Investment Trend

The COVID-19 crisis has created ripples in the industry, globally.

While the crisis has disrupted the industry activity, experts also look at it as an opportunity in many ways towards digital transformation.

The crucial part of this journey is ‘increasing cloud adoption’.

What’s The Driving Force?

Because of the lockdown measures, most companies are encouraging ‘work from home’ policy for employee safety. Initially the necessity, the remote working culture is now transforming into a new normal, globally.

A few technology giants have announced ‘work from home’ until the end of this year. While most large and medium enterprises are getting prepared to work with 50 percent capacity.

A few other companies have kept the options open for employees to choose between ‘work from home’ and ‘physical workplace’. All these are eventually driving the demand for cloud adoption and cloud migration on a rapid scale.

Tapping the Cloud Potential

In the event of remote working, businesses must rely on cloud technology for application, data, storage, and flexible computing power. Cloud ensures cost savings by limiting the operational expenditure required for backup/recovery and maintenance.

According to pre-Covid19 estimates, the public cloud computing market is poised to grow 17 percent to USD 266.4 million this year.

Software as a Service (SaaS) is expected to be the largest segment, while the Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS) is going to see the fastest growth rate.

Moreover, Cloud offers a due boost to AI-backed initiatives. Companies implementing AI are already reporting a rise in their revenues along with cost savings. So, cloud addition would add to their advantage.

Thus, Cloud technology holds a promising trend at present and for the future, making cloud migration the need of the hour for any company.

ALSO READ: Cloud Computing Advantages for the Healthcare Industry

Cloud Migration Requires Effective Planning

It would help if you had a perfect Cloud migration implementation backed by effective planning and strategy to witness the cloud advantage.

Migrating to Cloud is moving from legacy to cloud infrastructure, which is purely an all-round transformation around infrastructure, data, and security.

Cloud migration changes the enterprise structure and behavior as a whole. It may also interrupt the existing workflow in a short or long-term period.

Cloud infrastructure setup requires a fine balancing of accessibility and security because of the possible vulnerabilities during the migration process.

Other crucial areas that demand perfect sync are product teams and cloud migration specialists, as product teams might not have direct involvement in the migration process.

Product teams that generally manage apps to be migrated might not have complete knowledge about the underlying architecture specialists are aware of.

Then, what makes an effective cloud migration strategy?

Various factors characterize effective cloud migration, majorly self-learning, autonomous teams, migration best practices, and ‘learn as you grow’ process.

effective cloud migration strategy

1) Self-Learning

Let there be a sandbox environment for developers to explore and experiment with cloud tools. Lessons need to be documented to prepare a standardized process. Analyze code samples and resources from the proof-of-concept apps during the learning process. Make sure the self-learning is measurable, and teams are part of it!

2) Autonomous Teams

Along the path from development to production, let the teams have complete control over application and infrastructure code, CI/CD pipeline and deployments. With less dependence on infrastructure or DevOps environment, let them take a call based on set parameters and decide on cloud tools for their specific use-cases.

3) Migration Best Practices

Analyze common patterns and reference architectures to implement best practices. Document the experiences as proof of concepts, communicate them cross-functionally across the organization, and set standards for future migrations. The documentation shouldn’t be limited to application architecture. That should also include compliance and monitoring, data storage, identity and access management, among others. The best practice documentation should have clear illustrations about the process implementation, along with a continuous feedback mechanism.

4) Learn As You Grow

Let the teams document learning as they grow in the process and turn that into communicable resources. These resources should ideally evolve with the migration process. Improve the efforts through cross-team collaboration, scheduling code reviews, and create a centralized document repository. But make sure the information and access are widespread.

These four factors lay down the clear roadmap for cloud migration planning easier, making the implementation easier.

In Conclusion
Given the hardships involved, most companies prefer an external cloud consulting service provider or a consultant for effective implementation.

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