In this on-going pandemic, work from home culture is rising. More and more businesses and offices are adapting to this new norm. However, managing the server room in the offices still demands regular staff and IT personnel visits, becoming a significant inconvenience.  As a result, more and more firms are opting for cloud migration. Cloud migration is the process of transferring data, applications, and other components which are generally hosted by on-premise servers to a cloud-computing environment.

By shifting data and applications to the cloud, the employees can access them with ease at home from any part of the world.  Cloud migration does not just help businesses by helping them get rid of on-site servers but also gives them a chance to expand and increase their scale and workload, which their existing servers may not be able to handle cost-effectively.

If you are considering cloud migration to fulfill your need for managed IT services, here are some tips and best practices you should follow.

Plan the migration

The most important thing on your checklist before migrating to the cloud is to make a detailed plan and strategy. For that, you must understand and tabulate what cloud migration is, why you are opting for it, and what exactly you are going to shift to the cloud computing environment.

Choose the right cloud migration strategy

There are five popular strategies proposed by Gartner to choose –

• Rehost- In simple terms, this refers to transferring existing data applications as it is from current on-premise servers to cloud servers.
• Reactions- Here, before/during shifting to cloud-based tools and frameworks, changes are adapted without making architectural or code changes in your application.
• Revise- Here, partial architectural and code changes are made to the application to fit the cloud computing network best.
• Rebuild- Here, the application code is re-written, and architecture is rebuilt before making the shift.
• Replace- This involves abandoning your current application and adopting a new one that best fits the cloud computing network.

There are multiple leading cloud service providers to choose from, like; Microsoft’s Azure, Amazon’s AWS, and Google cloud platform. You must go through the services these providers offer and make a choice that best fits your needs at the right cost.

Ensure security and privacy

It is of utmost importance to make sure that your data and applications are safe and secure.  You must know beforehand as to who all should be able to access, use, edit, and change your data/applications. Most of the leading cloud service providers maintain high-security standards; however, it is recommended that you go through the providers’ security policies before choosing one.

Familiarize and train the staff for cloud computing

This whole migration will be futile if your staff and employees are not familiar with cloud computing. Hence, it is essential to train the staff and familiarize them with making cloud computing easier for your organization.

The entire point of fostering a culture of using the cloud will be highly useful if all your team members are on board with the decision and find the shift easy in the long run.