HOW TO MIGRATE TO THE CLOUD WHEN YOU’RE IN A HURRY

Imagine for a moment that you have outgrown your existing location. Or you have merged with or spun off from another organization. You had been thinking about moving to the cloud, but were not ready yet. Suddenly, you need to make that decision very quickly. If you were on premise, should you get a private cloud or adopt a hybrid model? If you had a hybrid model, should you keep it? This is a complex project, made even riskier by the fact that you have no time to lose: the move, merger or divestment is occurring right now. How can you migrate your data center now without causing delays or disruptions to your data flow and everyday operations?

There may be a temptation to find a short-term workaround by moving to a public cloud until you can sort things out. This may cause more troubles than it’s worth, because scaling from private to public cloud is extremely complex in itself, and if you later move to a private cloud, you will have to plan and execute two migrations.

The key to a successful move to the cloud is careful and detailed planning. An experienced managed services partner can be very helpful. This partner can either be your cloud hosting provider or a separate company that provides IT managed services. Calitech™ provides both services.

Before migrating your processes and data storage, consider what the costs are, not only for today but how it is likely to progress over the next ten years in best and worst case scenarios. You need to know what will be the total cost of migrating your data, what data, if any, need to be kept in the private cloud versus which ones can go to public, and what is your exit strategy if you decide to eventually change cloud service providers.

You must remember that the choice of moving to a data center for public, private, or hybrid cloud depends on your organization and its specific needs. There is no one size fits all. Finding the right strategy takes time and planning for today and decades into the future.