6 Best Practices for Enterprise Cloud Migration

According to Forbes, 83% of enterprise organizations will migrate over to a cloud platform by the end of 2020, with 20% predicted to be private cloud based followed by 22% running on a hybrid model.  It is critically important to understand the many factors to consider when thinking of the quality and the duration of the cloud migration process. Below are six best practices, our Datalink Network's team has discovered when completing cloud migrations for various organizations. 

1. Setting Expectations 

The first step in any migration plan should begin by establishing goals and expected outcomes for the project. This step will guide the entire project and enable all teams to identify potential obstacles. Questions that your organization will need to ask themselves is: 

• • • Which factors of our data must be preserved in the move?
    • How will users be impacted?
    • What is our management plan to mitigate disruption?
    • How long will the migration take? What will the cost be? 

2. Assessing the Data

To prevent your team from feeling overwhelmed by the data assessment process, separate the task into more manageable pieces. 

Gather

• • total number of files
  • average file size
  • total storage for all content

Discover

• • permissions, sharing, and collaboration details
  • embedded links
  • records management policies

Analyze

• • existing file and folder taxonomy 
  • content by business unit
  • topology breakdown

3. Analyze the IT Environment

In order to ensure you can meet your migration expectations, it is critically important that your team is aware of the limitations in your organization's technical capabilities. Take a look at: 

• • Source and Destination Platforms
  • Migration Resources
  • Elasticity

4. Identify the Risks

After analyzing your organizations IT environment, you must be critical when identifying the risks. This will ensure your team with what to look out for during the migration process. The most common risk we have seen during a migration are as follows: 

• • • Collaboration interruption 
    • Failure to minimize cut-over duration
    • External shared content conflicts
    • Automated processing dependencies

5. Determine the Best Migration Approach

When determining the best migration approach for your organization there are two common ways to execute. 

Grouped Wave Approach

In the grouped wave approach, you will divide up one large migration into more smaller and manageable migrations. This approach will be best for an organization that cannot allocate a large chunk of time to the migration. 

Big Bang Approach

This type of migration approach is most commonly used that organizations use when they want migration process to be done all at one time. This approach may be much smoother and result in lower migration cost, however, will require that all operations be shut down for a period of time. 

6. Build Migration Plan

After completing steps 1-5 it is finally time to build the migration plan which will include all of the resources, processes, and technical configuration necessary to execute the migration. A brief overview of what your plan should include is: 

• • • The migration approaches
    • Execution management processes
    • Project timeline and milestones
    • Testing process

Read our full article on Microsoft Azure vs. AWS vs. Google Cloud – 2021 Cloud feature comparison guide.

Ready to get started? Contact us today to discuss your organization's cloud migration project.