Congratulations, you’ve finally made the big leap to the cloud! You’ve prepared your employees and IT infrastructure, rewritten applications, secured data, and spent a lot of money to ensure that your business’s migration goes as smoothly as possible without too many hitches. After you’ve shifted your systems, you might be asking yourself: what now?
Just because all migration processes are completed does not mean the job is done. These tasks should immediately follow:
#1. Remove unused resources
After migrating to the cloud and making sure everything works as planned, it’s important to clean up your infrastructure. This step may include shutting down and removing redundant systems, disconnecting unnecessary network connections, and switching migrated applications to production status.
Running and maintaining unimportant resources can end up being too costly for your business and lead to operational confusion. All non-essential parts of your system should be systematically disconnected to ensure optimal performance.
#2. Evaluate your goals
The next thing to do is to evaluate your goals for the migration process. Did you achieve them?
There are two points of reference to evaluate the success of your cloud migration: your business case and the key performance indicators (KPIs) you defined in your audit.
Your business case is the reason for initiating the migration. You should have been able to get the backing of all your stakeholders through an honest evaluation of the need to move to the cloud.
When it comes to your KPIs, there are four main factors to measure after your migration:
- Infrastructure: This measures your hardware and network usage. An effective cloud management platform should give you necessary information at a glance, such as CPU and memory usage, disk performance, network latency, and load balancing.
- Application performance: The reliability, availability, and performance of your cloud applications will be crucial factors in determining the success of your migration. These are usually measured through error rates, number of connection time-outs, latency, and the amount of data passing through the apps.
- User experience (UX): Even if an application is available all the time, you have to look at its response time. Check for lags or request spikes and observe how your application will respond. Long response times might indicate issues with load balancing or a dependency on a non-cloud native app. Other factors can include internet congestion or incorrect cloud setup.
- Cost/Time savings: This will be important in making an accurate ROI for your cloud journey. Some good KPIs to track include monthly billing, ongoing staff expenses, and the cost of third-party management tools. These should be tracked against the cost of running the same infrastructure and applications on-site.
#3. Refactor applications for cost savings
Most of your cost efficiencies can come from using cloud-based technologies and methodologies. As such, one way to optimize your costs is to restructure your applications so you can benefit from on-demand provisions such as “Function-as-a-Service” architectures.
You can also use stateless applications, which are programs that do not save client data generated in one session. Once the session is over, the data is destroyed.
#4. Review security policies
During migration, your applications are rewritten for the cloud. In this process, your apps are hosted in their original local environment and the cloud. For the programs to be successfully rewritten, your security policies have to allow traffic and system access between the two environments. After decommissioning the old version of the applications, however, you need to immediately review your security implementations.
You can wait until all of your legacy applications have been decommissioned, but by doing so, you’re opening up your IT systems to security risks, such as malware and distributed denial-of-service (DDoS) attacks. Decommissioning your legacy apps can be a tedious process, but remember that security breaches are harder and more expensive to deal with.
#5. Preserve the knowledge and experience
After your move to the cloud, your migration team will have already developed significant skills and knowledge of your system and how to use the cloud to optimize it. This knowledge can be very helpful to your business in the future, so keep the migration team under a “Center of Excellence” group that will help with strategies and decisions even after you have successfully migrated all your resources to the cloud.
Moving to the cloud is never an easy task. Binatech makes it easier for you by deploying, managing, and supporting your company’s server environment in a secure data center. Discover what the cloud can do for your business. Call us today!
