Partnering with cloud migration services is a crucial decision for any business, and it requires careful planning and consideration. It is possible, however, to ensure that your business is well-prepared to move to the cloud and that the transition is successful with the right approach.
According to a report from Tech Monitor, business owners said that 30% of their cloud budget goes to waste—therefore, making the right choice when choosing the right cloud migration service is crucial before making a commitment.
Your cloud migration journey must include one small but crucial step, which is the cloud readiness assessment. You will gain a better understanding of how you are progressing with your cloud adoption and be better prepared for possible pitfalls.
What is a Cloud Readiness Assessment?
During a cloud readiness assessment, your system and processes are thoroughly reviewed. By assessing your organization’s weaknesses and issues, it provides a detailed roadmap to successful cloud migration.
Your organization’s infrastructure, applications, and data are examined during the assessment, along with your security policies and compliance requirements. Moreover, it can help you identify potential cost savings associated with the migration. Lastly, a cloud readiness assessment evaluates your staff’s technical skills and IT processes to ensure a successful transition.
Specifically, cloud readiness assessments include the following activities:
- Ensures organization processes readiness
- Discovering the application landscape
- Performing an infrastructure assessment
- Maintaining security and compliance requirements
- Considering future scaling aspects
In order to be successful in moving an organization’s infrastructure to the cloud, it is recommended to conduct an application readiness assessment. In itself, cloud migration is a substantial investment.
Taking the time and effort to prepare and create a solid plan will not only make the move smooth sailing but also reduce the time and expense of migration.
Things to Consider in Cloud Readiness Assessment
Organizations beginning their journey to the cloud must evaluate their operations at the very beginning.
An organization must assess its business, people, processes, and technology to know whether they are ready for the cloud. To determine how prepared you are for the cloud, you should consider the following vital factors:
Objectives
Defining your business objectives before you move to the cloud should be the first thing you consider. There is no point in investing in the cloud simply for the sake of just using it.
Instead, you must establish clear goals and outcomes for migration—they must be aligned with stakeholders to avoid confusion and miscommunication. Furthermore, objectives contribute to the measurement of your venture’s success, which is why they are significant.
Stakeholders
Before beginning any cloud readiness assessment, you should meet with your business operations stakeholders. The group should include internal teams like finance, accounting, and human resources, as well as external teams like sales, marketing, and investor relations.
In order to show these groups the actual benefits of adopting cloud technology, they need to be convinced that leveraging it is more value-adding than their current solutions. Essentially, this is a self-assessment for the person who is performing the procedure.
The first step will be for this person to ask and listen to the pain points of each group. It would then be necessary for the assessor to possess knowledge of the cloud solutions that can minimize or eliminate these pain points. In the planning process for cloud migration, these will become key guideposts.
Employees
You will need to review your current technology staff as one of the first areas in your cloud readiness assessment. It is natural that we all have different tolerances for learning new things, altering our work processes, and generally keeping up with the changes in our environment.
This is why it is crucial to include some high-level assessment of cloud technology skills, education, and the availability of time in the review of the current staff.
Processes
It is likely that the majority of technology departments have some level of governance, compliance, and security requirements—some of which will be affected by the deployment of cloud technology. It is crucial to perform a cloud readiness assessment to figure out how many processes are going to be affected by the migration to the cloud.
Technology
It is often believed that this is the easiest part of a readiness assessment. It can be, however, the most challenging part of the process. In order to assess your readiness, you need to understand your current technology stack, including applications, infrastructure, and data.
When we rush to put solutions in place, documentation is often overlooked. It is then that this aspect of the assessment poses a challenge.
A thorough assessment of your application portfolio is required in this area. In this step, you will estimate how many applications can be moved to the cloud. It is not important to focus on how the application will be moved. Instead, you should simply ask if it can be transferred to the cloud.
A few applications are near or at the end of their useful lives, while others are simply outdated utilities that need to be replaced. You should then evaluate your current infrastructure, starting at the network layer and ending at the operations level of the data center.
Budget
Another essential step is to consider a budget estimate you will be able to meet. During the estimation, both migration costs and cloud operations costs should be considered, and if you want to meet your budget, you should also calculate the total cost of ownership (TCO).
The budget for your project may vary according to various factors, such as the size of your assets and additional expenses, including license costs and additional hardware purchases.
Connect with Laminar Consulting for your Cloud Readiness Assessment
Cloud readiness assessments require you to work through each of these areas at the fastest pace while still collecting the essential information you need.
After analyzing the information collected, the final part of the assessment involves making some judgment calls based on the data collected. Ultimately, it is the time element that will determine when you are ready to move forward with cloud computing.
By carefully planning your cloud strategy, you can ensure that security measures and data protection have been taken for your company. For more information on cloud migration services, our consultants can offer you a free cloud readiness assessment consultation by calling us at 888-531-9995 at Laminar Consulting Service today!
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