Thinking of Moving Your Business to the Cloud? These Six Considerations Will Ease Your Journey

Enterprise adoption among small and medium enterprises is growing. Once the preserve of startups and large corporations, smaller businesses that had until now been content with their legacy systems have recognized the benefits that infrastructure-as-a-service can bring to their business.

But recognizing the potential benefits of the cloud in abstract terms isn't enough. A significant percentage of cloud migrations run into problems — and sometimes fail altogether — because there wasn't sufficient upfront planning. Failed cloud projects can be expensive, and smaller businesses can't afford to waste resources on IT projects that end up going nowhere.

In this article, I want to discuss six steps business should take in preparation for a cloud migration. Hopefully, they'll help you avoid many of the pain points that other businesses have run into.

1. Know Why You Need The Cloud

First step: set out exactly what you expect from your cloud infrastructure and what business processes you will be moving to the cloud. Develop a clear understanding of how your cloud infrastructure will fit in with your existing IT processes and integrate with legacy systems.

If you just want to use IaaS to deploy testing or development servers, that's straightforward enough, but if you're moving complex databases or mission critical applications, you should ensure that you understand upfront exactly what is involved in migrating those systems. If you don't feel qualified to make those determinations yourself, hire a professional who does or talk to cloud vendors — many will be prepared to discuss how they can help before you make a purchase.

The idea is to create a document that lays out exactly what you need and expect from your cloud infrastructure in some detail — a mapping of your current infrastructure and processes to the new cloud infrastructure that will take over from it.

photo credit: Parmiter Antiques Southsea Luggage via photopin (license)