Once you’ve migrated to the cloud, you may find that your organization’s needs and priorities have shifted, expanded, and evolved in a way that compels you to look for a new cloud provider. Business reasons for switching cloud providers include:
- performance issues—a competitor may promise faster delivery;
- functionality and tools that your business needs to enhance profitability aren’t available from your current cloud provider;
- better pricing;
- higher service levels; and
- the need for expanded scalability to accommodate business growth.
You may assume that once you’ve done the hard work of migrating to the cloud moving to a different cloud provider would be as simple as transferring files. Unfortunately, the opposite is true. Once you’re in, getting out of the cloud can be difficult.
Moving your data between clouds is a complex process often hindered by vendor lock-in strategies, operating system restrictions, and network configurations that are exclusive to the cloud provider. Without careful planning, moving to a new cloud provider could create chaos within your organization.
A Cloud-to-Cloud Migration Checklist to Get You Started
You can take some actions to ensure success. Here’s a checklist for launching a successful cloud-to-cloud migration strategy.
Research potential cloud providers
- Ensure that the prospective cloud provider has the precise functionality you need.
- Does the provider off a propriety, open source, or hybrid platform?
Audit systems to verify new providers can meet your needs
- Evaluate current cloud resource levels by running workload tests to identify cloud resources used and what’s needed.
- Evaluate storage size, bandwidth, and capacity requirements to ensure that your new cloud provider meets your present and future needs.
Understand pricing
- The cloud often reduces software and staffing expenses, but the financial benefits may not be readily identifiable.
- Look for hidden charges that can be tied to the bandwidth you use, messages sent, and location.
- Reevaluate processes and applications.
- If applications remain unchanged, will licensing constraints keep you from moving them?
Create a migration blueprint
- Identify key software components, functionalities, and data that you’ll move.
Configure for security and diverse IT environments
- Use industry standards such as JavaScript Object Notation (JSON), OAuth, and HTTP.
- Take advantage of container technology to isolate software from its environment and abstract dependencies away from the cloud provider.
Determine how you’ll move your data
- Consider the size and security level of your data.
- Is there an internet connection?
- Will you compress data?
- Will you copy data to physical drives, and then ship the drives to the cloud provider?
- What’s the provider’s plan for downtime?
- Create a full data backup for macro- and micro-level programs.
- Ensure that data are portable for future migrations.
- Verify that your new cloud provider offers a way to extract data easily and cost-effectively.
Train and test
- Train IT administrators before the migration to ensure that they understand how to use the new cloud administration management and maintenance tools.
- Ensure that apps work as expected with the user loads you anticipate.
- Verify that all the data have been migrated and are accessible to users and applications.
Switching cloud providers will likely be inevitable. Armed with this knowledge, plan your cloud exit strategy with an eye toward building flexibility to ensure you can switch as costs and capabilities change.