Your Company Has Decided to Move to the Cloud - What's Next?
After a long debate, the senior leadership at your company has decided they want to start migrating to the cloud and you will be heavily involved with every step of the migration. This will include planning activities such as budgeting, resource planning, architecture planning, and more. Later on in the project, you will also be responsible for ensuring the migration is smooth and that the environment is consistently optimized post-migration. This blog will focus on the planning activities and where your focus should be when planning a migration to the cloud.
The initial focus will be resource planning. This will require an initial evaluation of is this a lift and shift project or is part of the migration to use different cloud services to modernize the environment? If it’s a straight lift and shift, the project probably requires less experience as migrating infrastructure is straight-forward. On the other hand, if part of the migration is to modernize parts of the environment, more experience and skills will be required to work with the newer technology. The next step is to make a serious evaluation of your internal team and their skill level. How much cloud experience does your team have? Has anyone on the team completed a cloud migration? Who has experience with what services? If you are on the lower level of this experience scale, you may need to hire consultants (like SVG Consulting) to assist with your migration effort. If you are on the higher end of the experience scale, you will likely be able to keep the project internal.
When it comes to budgeting, there are two major items that will affect this, one is in the above paragraph where you need to decide if you need to hire external help to assist your migration efforts. The other major item is based on your architecture planning. Some questions to ask amongst your team might be, how many servers do we have? How much data are we storing? What does our BC/DR strategy look like? How much storage, compute, network, database, etc performance do we need in the cloud? What cloud services are we using? All of these questions will help you budget your cloud environment. Each public cloud has their own cost calculator that will help you to project costs for your migration based on the different services you plan to use.
Stay tuned for the next blog about Cloud Governance!