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Studies have shown that nearly one third (approximately 32 percent) of an organization’s annual IT budget will be consumed by cloud services by 2021.

From being an experimental technology in the early 2000s to being the backbone of digital transformation 2 decades later, cloud computing has positively impacted businesses thanks to a string of applications and use cases it created. From popular music and video streaming platforms to heavyweight industrial applications, both the public and corporations rely on cloud services for a variety of purposes.

As more enterprises begin to embed cloud into their growth projections, there is an increasing pressure mounting on leaders to facilitate a smooth transition to the cloud from legacy systems. Any disruptions can prove to be a nightmare for businesses as they could potentially drive away customers to competitors due to service or business unavailability as a result of a wrong migration approach. The challenge for enterprise leaders is to find the most successful migration roadmap to propel their legacy infrastructure into cloud without impacting business operations.

We have compiled these tips dubbed the 5 secrets to successful cloud migration and these have been curated from multiple successful leaders in the cloud space.

Let us explore them in detail:

Devise an Objective
For different organizations, the motive or driving force behind their desire to migrate to the cloud might be different. Before a migration exercise, it is crucial for a business to arrive at an objective for the migration. The objective could be to improve the flexibility and productivity of their IT systems, cost reduction, technical superiority over peers, and much more. By listing out the objectives, it will be easier to translate them into KPI’s and metrics that can be assigned to respective teams or business unit leaders to implement, measure, and iterate based on feedback from all stakeholders including end customers.

Prioritizing the Right Applications
The more your businesses applications run on the cloud, the greater will be the flexibility. But this does not imply that you need to push all enterprise applications into the cloud in one go. Such an unplanned exercise can even derail all hopes of realizing value from your cloud investments. Every business application will have its own characteristics, technical complexities, code and architectural differences, and other elements that will require them to accommodate different modes of deployment.

Some may perform well in private cloud infrastructure, while others better in public or some even in hybrid or multi-cloud environments. By carefully analyzing each business application, leaders must take the call to prioritize applications in the migration journey. Some applications may require complete code overhaul or design changes and they may have to be rebuilt or re-purposed for the cloud. These applications may move further down to the migration timeline as they require extensive customizations and configurations before being able to deliver optimal services in their cloud avatar.

Security Takes Center Stage
When enterprise workloads and data are moved to the cloud, there should be an extra focus on ensuring that the cloud ecosystem is secure and confidential data has zero chances of being compromised. The security aspect of data management must be made aware to every single employee who utilizes or builds the applications that the enterprise needs on the cloud. In this way, security decisions can be implemented at the foundation level and scaled up to meet the demands of the infrastructure as more business environments transition into the cloud. Intelligent threat monitoring, high levels of data encryption, and highly sophisticated access control mechanisms must be put in place to prevent any loss of integrity of end-user data stored in the cloud.

For different organizations, the motive or driving force behind their desire to migrate to the cloud might be different

Choosing the Right Partner for the Migration
In most cases, businesses lie on one or more technology partners to create and execute their cloud migration strategy. For evaluating the right choice amongst partner options, enterprises must analyze work done by all competing partners in domains similar to theirs. Additionally, the vendor chosen must be capable of creating and managing an endto-end strategy to move the enterprise workloads securely and productively into cloud. The partner should be able to guide on how to achieve the key secret success elements in the cloud migration exercise. They should be knowledgeable and well versed with trends and capabilities in cloud for your business domain.

Disaster Recovery
A key element of every migration strategy should be planning for unplanned emergencies. The COVID-19 pandemic is an example to demonstrate how unpreparedness in digital environments led to severe business disruption during the pandemic in several countries. Additionally, there should be a disaster recovery strategy in place which focuses on retrieving data stored in the cloud in the event of a catastrophic failure of the service. Those cloud vendors that offer more value in their disaster monitoring and recovery mechanisms will obviously get preferential consideration.

Cloud computing is here to stay. As more businesses experiment with cloud to unlock new channels of digital engagement and business opportunities, it is important for having the right awareness of how to plan and execute a successful cloud migration strategy. The above tips are sure to help enterprises make an informed choice about their cloud migration aspirations.