How to Migrate to the Cloud…Without Crying
If you are wondering how to migrate to the cloud without the project bringing you to the edge of tears, you are not alone. Migrating business-critical systems to the cloud can be a very demanding process.
It can feel like you have a million tasks to do. Even then, how can you be sure you've not overlooked something important?
To help you out, we've put together a list of things to consider before, during, and after migrating your systems to the cloud. As you prepare for the transition, use this list to reduce the chance of forgetting things you need to think about. As a result, you will feel a lot more confident and may just make it through it all without shedding a single tear.
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1. Evaluate Your Starting Place
If you were planning to physically move your business, you might start by taking an inventory of everything that needs to be moved. The same goes when migrating your server-based IT systems to the cloud. If you already have a detailed inventory of your IT hardware, systems and settings, make sure it's up to date.
You're not just interested in documenting hardware resource levels, but also applications, virtual machines, IP addresses, DNS servers, required frameworks, subnets, user quotas, permissions, backup processes, IT service contracts and support details. This will help ensure aspects of your IT are not overlooked.
2. Decide Exactly Where You Are Going
What are you hoping to accomplish with this migration? What does your organisation expect? Before you get too far into this process, you must consider what a successful migration will look like.
If your main reason for moving your organisation's IT systems to the cloud is to save money, keep that thought top of mind during your engagement with suppliers.
Alternatively, you might want to improve system reliability, scalability and performance, in which case you may end up talking to different suppliers and focusing on a different solution design.
If you know what is essential to you, your team, and your organisation, and what's merely nice to have, you are in a better position to find a service that will give you what you want, as you can disqualify suppliers who lack the understanding you need.
3. Understand Budget Constraints
It's far soon too in the process to finalise your budget. However, it is good to get some idea of roughly what level of spending would be acceptable to your organisation, as that will greatly impact the choices you make next - in terms of the partners you work with, the level of technical ambition, whether you add resilience to your hosting setup and whether you get additional help with the migration itself.
If you have a very limited budget, you'll need to be more ruthless when making choices about how much data to store and backup, and do more of the migration work yourself.
4. Find Suitable Cloud Partners
Much of the success... or pain... of cloud migration will be down to which supplier(s) you work with to design, plan and execute your migration.
Reach out to cloud hosting providers (or their partners if you are working with large companies like Amazon, Microsoft, or Google).
With your inventory and goals in hand, you can have initial conversations and begin to collect proposals, specifications, and estimates. Then, you and your team can start reviewing proposals to see which providers might be able to meet your needs.
5. Ask All the Right Questions
As you get closer to choosing your cloud hosting partner, be sure to drill down into the specifics of the proposal, including technical specifications and details regarding monitoring, support, resilience, security and business continuity. You'll want to know what's included as part of your service and what is merely an option available on request, at a charge.
Be sure to review service level agreements, certification information, hosting architecture diagrams, monitoring details and support services. It is also critical to review the pricing in the event you need more storage, VMs, RAM, CPUs, or even additional technical support.
6. Loop in Legal
Your legal department (or the person who fulfils that role in your organisation) will want to review any cloud hosting provider's terms and conditions. This isn't always a quick process, so get them involved early - when you're down to the final one or two likely suppliers.
If your legal team isn't willing to sign off on the provider's standard terms, you will need to work with the provider to negotiate amendments to those terms, or if that's not possible, find a different supplier.
Bear in mind that the largest cloud providers dictate terms, which you can choose to take or leave, unless your organisation is very large. Smaller providers will often be more flexible on terms.
7. Time to Tidy Up
Cloud hosting bills tend to be based on the volume of resources you use or reserve. So it pays to declutter your IT systems prior to cloud migration.
Pay attention to duplicate files, files with extensions associated with programs that aren't work related, and old files that no longer need to be kept for compliance, legal or operational purposes. In addition, uninstall any server applications you're not using and get rid of any VMs or databases you don't need.
8. Get 'Cloud' Approved
At some point, no matter how cordial the relationship between you and your would-be cloud provider/partner, they are going to need you to sign a contract - probably a multi-year one worth five or six figures. Before you can sign that - regardless of your budgetary authority - you're going to want to get approval from your organisation for shifting things to the cloud. You may be able to get a time-limited free trial prior to this.
This will likely involve you making a clear business case for moving away from on-premise DIY hosting towards hosting on a serious enterprise-grade cloud. Help your less technical colleagues see that shift as being about delivering benefits to the business, not about moving servers from place A to place B. Cloud migration is usually about delivering a much-needed IT platform upgrade that will underpin core business processes and digital services.
Often, the move to the cloud isn't really about saving money - unless your firm is already paying for a costly managed hosting contract. It's about seriously levelling up your IT platform, so people in your business can focus on the unique things they can deliver for customers. Put another way, it's paying a bit of a premium so you don't have to be your own hosting company, and can instead say 'Hosting isn't really our area of expertise, it's yours. You do that, so we can focus on what we do best."
9. Make a Detailed Plan
To ensure your move to the cloud goes smoothly, you will need to write a detailed plan for your cloud migration with a draft timeline.
Don't assume your migration is a single one-time event. Often, there will be a series of migration attempts - some just being disposable trials where you don't really plan to use the 'trial' copy on the cloud. Other migration attempts may focus on just a subset of your systems. The entire migration may take several weeks or months, especially if you need to do most tasks out-of-hours, to avoid causing downtime during business hours.
You don't just need to figure out what you're moving, but the order in which systems will be moved. Consider which systems will be easiest to move - such as development/testing systems with no external users and few dependencies. Also consider which systems are business-critical even in the short-term, so have to be migrated with extra care? What parts of the migration will take the most time? What interdependent systems will need to be migrated at the same time as each other?
Creating your cloud migration plan will be a team effort. You will need input from your cloud service provider or its partner, and from your IT team. Run the plan by departmental leaders within your organisation, as they may know of operational reasons why your draft migration schedule needs to be adjusted.
10. Be Sure You Know Who to Call
When you're moving workloads and data to the cloud, changing licence activations, IP addresses, and firewalls, things can go wrong. It's therefore essential that you know how to contact the people who can help you fix these issues, and in some cases, the people who work for the organisations that caused these issues in the first place by misconfiguring things - mistakes they now need to fix!
You'll want to know the contact details of your new cloud provider, your IT Support company's details (if applicable), and the details of any vendors whose software you will be migrating, in ways that might lead to license activation issues.
You need a contact list with names, roles, direct phone numbers and direct email addresses of all relevant parties. If you're migrating from your own email server to a cloud-hosted service or a cloud-hosted server, make sure you have alternative email addresses for anyone whose corporate email might be adversely affected by the move - in case things don't go to plan. Share the list with relevant suppliers, so they can contact relevant contacts directly.
If you're moving to or from a given hosting provider, you may need to authorise certain contacts to act on your firm's behalf, so those contacts can liaise with the provider's support team or use its portal, on your behalf. You can always delete those user accounts post-migration, or rescind a letter of authorisation allowing other external parties to act on your behalf.
11. Check Your Connection
When people think about moving systems to the cloud, they often consider the amount of RAM, CPU cycles and data storage that will be required. They often forget another requirement - bandwidth.
If your apps were previously hosted on an on-premise server by users on the same LAN, migrating those apps to the cloud will mean an increase in traffic to and from your office LAN to the cloud.
Local Area Networks usually support speeds of 1Gbps or 10Gbps. Your office's upstream bandwidth may be considerably lower - possibly a tenth of that. So transferring material amounts of data to or from your cloud could possibly take ten times longer than you're used to.
So consider your network bandwidth requirements well in advance of your move to the cloud. If necessary, upgrade your office's data connection in good time. Keep in mind that installing new leased lines can take months, so you need to think about this topic in advance.
If you're moving to public clouds such as those offered by AWS or Azure, consider whether it would be worth getting your own private, high-capacity, low-latency link to those clouds. Such links are available! In the case of AWS, we provide them using AWS Direct Connect. In the case of Azure, we provide those links using Azure ExpressRoute.
12. Back Up Your IT
Start with a full backup of all your systems before beginning the migration. Check that files, folders, databases and virtual machines are recoverable by deleting and attempting to restore files/folders/databases/virtual machines created for that DR exercise.
Arrange to backup your new cloud-based data and systems. Just because something is hosted in the cloud doesn't mean it no longer needs backing up.
Ideally, it is best to pick a backup solution that can back up your cloud, your SaaS data, and any data that's still on on-premise systems. For example, we have customers that choose Veeam software for their backups because it allows them to backup their on-premise systems, their cloud-based servers, and the data hosted by Office 365.
Before you conduct your main cloud migration attempts, you will want to test your system is able to backup your new cloud's data.
13. Make IT Secure
As you move to the cloud, you will need to consider security at every step. This starts with your data. If it's being physically transported to the cloud, encrypt the data in advance, lest it get lost in transit.
You will also want to revisit security protocols so departing employees will quickly lose access to cloud assets.
Another way you can increase security is to outsource OS patching to your cloud hosting provider. That way, you increase the likelihood of it getting done - even when you're busy on other things, on holiday, or off sick.
When the migration is complete, consider how decommissioned systems will be handled. Before reselling, donating, or recycling anything, ensure all data has been securely wiped.
Bear in mind that your cloud servers will need to be protected via a firewall - virtual or physical. For fully resilient solutions, you'll need multiple firewalls, possibly in multiple data centres.
14. Document Everything
Create complete documentation for the new hosting solution and how it fits in with your WAN and any remaining on-premise systems and subnets.
The better the documentation, the easier it will be to deal with changing cloud providers or IT staff changing jobs.
Make sure to include instructions for the most common tasks and an explanation of technical support procedures, such as which number to call, and any reference numbers or authorisations required.
15. Conduct Trial Migrations
You will want to complete several trial migrations. How many are required will depend on the complexity of what you're moving, and how well - or badly - your migration attempts go.
Ask your cloud service partner to have help on standby at the designated 'migration' time should there be any issues or questions. It is also a good idea to schedule your trial when it will be least disruptive, like after work hours or on the weekend. Then, attempt the migration and test the applications to see whether they are working as expected. If you run into any problems, troubleshoot, and document the solutions, so you don't face a repeat of the problem on your next migration attempt.
In many cases, a trial migration will go so well in regard to a particular system that you decide that the 'trial' migration can in fact become the 'real' migration. Just be sure to use the applications, edit files etc, so file permission issues, database permission issues and performance issues can be detected and fixed. It can be helpful to ask departmental leaders to nominate someone to help with training, as tests by actual users may be more likely to find problems, as they know how the system is used in real life.
16. Communicate to Colleagues and Customers
It is crucial that everyone within your organisation knows what to expect during and after the cloud migration.
It is essential to give people plenty of advanced notice of anything that may impact their work. For example, they need to know when they will lose access to any systems and how long they will be offline.
If the migration will impact clients or customers, it is best to give them at least a few weeks' notice.
17. Migrate for Real
Be sure your cloud service provider (or their partner) has senior technical staff available to help with troubleshooting.
With your trial migrations completed successfully, it's time to do the 'real' migration. This will mean moving whatever is left to move that hasn't already been permanently shifted during successful trial migrations.
The aim is to get to a point where i) you can benefit fully from your new cloud, e.g. in terms of resilience, scalability etc ii) you can get rid of some of the hosting systems you've just superseded.
18. Optimise
Once everything is working broadly as it should, it is time to fine tune resource quotas. First, check if the utilisation levels for the VMs are close to existing quotas or excessively low relative to those quotas.
If necessary, adjust resource quotas for VMs up or down while taking cost implications into account.
Next, keep an eye out for any apps with sluggish performance. If you find poor performance, determine if the issue is caused by CPU or RAM constraints, storage latency, or insufficient bandwidth to the outside world, a database server or storage.
19. Training Time
Training for IT staff will need to begin before the migration. They will need to understand how to interact with the cloud provider's portals and support teams. IT personnel will also need to be trained on the most common tasks like adding VMs, setting up new subnets, and updating cloud firewall rules.
If you are migrating to a completely different SaaS system, such as Salesforce, you will also need to provide training for users too (or the staff members tasked with training those users). This is essential if users are to make full use of the software.
20. Shut Down Legacy Systems
Once you are comfortable that your migration is successful and your new cloud-hosted system is performing as expected, you can begin the process of decommissioning and disposing of your old systems.
Save a temporary suitably-encrypted copy of the VMs, files, and databases from the soon-to-be-decommissioned servers, just in case. That's especially important if you're wiping a system 'no-one uses.' With that protection in place, securely wipe the original data from the hardware. Unless the hardware is to be returned as part of a lease arrangement, it can be donated, resold, or recycled.
Once you're certain the migration has gone well, and a few months have gone by without material complaints about the decommissioned systems having disappeared, get rid of any temporary copies you kept as insurance. They're no longer needed now your new system is working well and your backups are working as expected.
21. Post Migration Follow-Up
Now that the migration is complete, it is time to schedule some periodic reviews.
Even if your new cloud system is perfectly atuned to your needs at the point of migration, your needs will change over time, leading to a mismatch. Perhaps usage of some systems will increase. Perhaps usage of other parts will decrease. Perhaps people will start to complain that a system seems to be getting slower.
Periodically, you should go over performance, usage, resource allocation, quotas, and billing to make sure you are making the most of your cloud hosting and check if you need to make adjustments. You will also want to review your documentation to ensure that any changes made post-migration are reflected in the documentation.
22. Keep an Eye on the Cost
Pay close attention to your cloud bills. Do everything you need to ensure the cloud provider's invoices are paid on time. You certainly don't want your system to go offline due to a billing issue. Pay close attention to the bills, especially the initial ones, in case there are any unexpected costs that weren't properly explained to you, or which indicate you're using far more of some resource than had been expected.
You should also review usage costs periodically just to be sure you aren't accruing more than expected usage fees.
Where costs are higher than expected, it may be because you're storing more data than expected or backing up more data than expected. In both cases, you need to check whether that additional usage is justified. If not, address adjust your data storage / backup settings to address the bloat.
We hope you've found this introduction to cloud migration planning helpful. If you'd like a more detailed look at the topic, download your copy of our complete guide to cloud migration. It's free. To get your copy, click on the link at the top of this page.
