Migrating your IT infrastructure to the cloud can be a transformational process for organisations. Once the decision has been made to migrate to the cloud, it can be easy to rush in and start moving assets but it is important to have a strategy and a plan of attack.
Moving to the cloud is not a small undertaking and ensuring it is done correctly, with employee buy in, is a big driver of future success for your organisation.
Cloud migration strategy
To take advantage of this potential, you need to document your strategy in a way that’s both understandable to cloud technicians and palatable to your stakeholders, illustrating the reasons your organisation should migrate to the cloud.
Defining your strategy starts with initial exploration of the concept of cloud adoption and culminates in a more specific business case and commitment from leadership.
A critical aspect of any cloud migration strategy, often conducted with limited resources, is the need to prioritise, the need to do things in the right order and ensuring you have identified the best steps to start with. When looking at this, focus on quick wins or cloud solutions that unlock benefits for later stages.
Cloud migration process
Migration waves
Once you have your cloud migration strategy defined and agreed, it is important to break this down into deliverable projects. The ideal format is to have a small agile team that follows an iterative process for each project one at a time. It is critical to focus on three key steps: planning the migration, delivering the migration and ensuring full adoption of the cloud solution.
These migration waves should encapsulate the full migration process and ensure the new cloud solution is fully adopted across the organisation. Governance and management processes should also be set up before moving on to the next wave, ensuring results and realised benefits.
To discover more about planning your migration, and the practical steps you can take to successfully migrate to the Microsoft cloud, download our cloud migration guide here.
