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The Gist
- Cloud migration essentials. Planning cloud migration strategy is vital to avoid issues and ensure smooth transition.
- Hosting platform choices. Selecting the right cloud hosting platform, like AWS or Azure, is crucial for successful migration.
- Expertise and experience. Access to the right expertise and experience is key for a smooth cloud migration process.
Cloud migrations are very commonplace but like any tech project they need to be properly planned to avoid problems and overcome the odd bump in road. We often get asked what elements need to be considered in planning out a cloud migration strategy. While there will be a lot of detail to define within the project, there are some major areas to consider upfront. In this article I’m going to look at seven of the major considerations when planning to move to the cloud.
It’s also quite commonplace for a cloud migration to coincide with other major changes such as a new iteration of a website, an upgrade of your CMS or DXP, or even a change of digital agency, so if there is a lot going on, it’s important not to take your eye off the ball.
Here’s my view of seven essential areas to think about for your cloud migration strategy.
1. Make Your Business Case for a Cloud Migration Strategy
The benefits of moving to the cloud are usually very clear so that there is not really a need to do an extensive business case. However, there can be cases when you need to make the argument, in particular if:
- You’re in a regulated sector or a risk-averse company where stakeholders are nervous about a cloud migration.
- Where there are dependencies on other systems making migration less clear cut.
- Where there is a significant effort and potential short-term cost required, and a tendency to put any decision off.
- Where there is a need to also upgrade a platform and a reluctance from users or admins to make the change.
- Where you’ll need to make a detailed business case, because all expenditure comes under scrutiny.
- Where you are tied to an arrangement with a data center, for example.
Making the business case will require analysis, but often this will be necessary or useful anyway to help plan the migration. But usually a business case has many positive aspects of a cloud migration to draw upon, including:
- Increased performance relating to reliability, speed and scale.
- Better scalability and flexibility.
- Easier access to core systems from anywhere, suiting hybrid working patterns for example.
- Reduced costs — particularly over the medium to long term (if the initial costs of migration are a stumbling block).
- Reduced effort around maintenance.
- The opportunity to retire some legacy kit and software.
- Potentially stronger security and monitoring.
- Reduced environmental impact.
- More robust business continuity.
- And more!
Related Article: How to Navigate Federal Cloud Migrations Successfully
2. Pick the Right Hosting Platform for Your Business
Or course, any cloud migration needs to decide on your hosting platform. This is most likely to be in the public cloud, but there are some cases where organizations need to arrange a private or hybrid cloud host. That’s a different subject for another day.
For the public cloud platforms, an overwhelming number of sites will choose either AWS or Azure, although there are other choices including Rackspace or Google Cloud.
Both Azure and AWS come with multiple benefits and tools, with a huge amount of experience in both across the industry. Choosing between the two will depend on:
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- The preference and experience of your team or agency
- Where there are specific technologies or dependencies that are better suited to either hosting platform
- Any existing hosting or commercial arrangement
- Cost and resourcing.
Related Article: The Troubled Migration to Cloud Contact Centers
3. Get Access to the Right Experience and Expertise
Having access to the right expertise is key to be able to plan a smooth cloud migration as well as ongoing support. The good news is that digital agencies have cloud migration experience in spades so there is a lot of choice in the help available when you’re trying to find the best provider. If you are keeping the migration in-house, ensure you are covered with the right expertise; if in doubt or it’s a little borderline, consider spending more to reduce the risk of something going wrong.
One thing to note is that the skills and experience relating to an AWS or an Azure migration are a little different, so if your agency has decades of working with AWS but has only carried out a limited number of Azure migrations, (or vice versa) then you may want to double check they are right for you. If you have particular unusual considerations — for example to meet stringent information security requirements or you highly scalable workloads — then it might be worth seeking additional advice.
Related Article: Building Seamless Data Pipelines in a Hybrid Cloud Environment
4. Don’t Break Your Dependencies
Your website or CMS may rely on or operate based on data or content feed from another system or third-party service. This could be anything from embedding data about the weather on one of your pages to ensuring there is single sign-on to your CMS based on your company’s Microsoft Entra IDs. If your digital experience platform (DXP) set-up is based on composable architecture or is headless, then the whole experience may depend on the ongoing integration between two or more systems.
In the cloud migration strategy it’s therefore essential to identify any dependencies and ensure these aren’t broken in the new cloud environment through rigorous testing. Sometimes dependencies can be more numerous than expected, with a potential for more obscure ones to sneak under the radar.
Related Article: Improving Customer Experience With Cloud-Native Applications
5. Cover Security and Compliance Policies and Processes
Information security and compliance-related policies and related processes are always essential to consider. Getting the right teams involved at an early stage to review and spot any potential issues with your proposed new hosting arrangement is important. For example, it may be that you need to consider the jurisdiction of where your data will be hosted, although both Azure and AWS should offer the choice of hosting location to tick any boxes here. There may also be issues around data privacy, while also monitoring (see below) will need to be put in place.
6. Arrange the Ongoing Management and Monitoring
Planning a cloud migration strategy is not only about the actual migration itself but also the ongoing maintenance, management and monitoring of the environment once the migration has been made. Whether the ongoing maintenance and monitoring is being done in-house or though an agency, there are a few things to think about upfront to ensure you in the best position once the migration has been completed:
- The roles relating to support, maintenance, management and monitoring.
- Sorting out access and any related permissions relating to the roles.
- Any service level agreement (SLA) with the agency or internally with business users.
- Agreed communication and escalation paths to report issues.
- Setting up any ongoing monitoring tools and who is responsible for each — thankfully both Azure and AWS come with multiple monitoring tools and options.
- Any related KPI and reporting framework linked to monitoring.
- Any security related processes.
- Clarifying any gray areas — for example perhaps you have a CDN like Cloudflare — and it may be that an agency or an IT department also needs access to this to sort out ongoing issues.
7. Minimize Disruption and Maximize Business Continuity
Like any other tech project, the project needs to be planned to minimize disruption and maximize business continuity. Ideally there should be minimum to no disruption. But sometimes a migration can be more complex and there may be a need for a change management effort, or a phased project plan, to support the least disruptive project.
And There’s More
In this post we’ve covered some of the elements to consider in planning your cloud migration strategy, but there are other factors to think about such as load balancing for good performance, and setting up the necessary environments for a robust DevOps approach. Ultimately, the secret of a successful cloud migration lies in good planning and getting the right people in with the necessary experience.
