Most businesses today are fully or partially in the cloud. Going online offers a huge number of advantages over local information technology infrastructures. Migrating your existing business to the cloud can take some work. Here are a few things to do before taking your company to the cloud to make sure you are fully prepared.
Back up Existing Data
The first thing you should do is back up all existing data on your local or network drives. You want to have data backed up securely on a reliable form of media and it is also a good idea to make complete disk images of the drives so they can be replicated if any problems occur during migration. Be sure everything is ready to be access and moved.
Categorize What Needs to Be Moved
You want to go through all of your data, applications, and other systems to categorize what needs to be moved. Start by eliminating anything that is no longer needed or will be replaced with cloud-based solutions. You want to basically categorize your components and data into discrete buckets so you will have an easier time tracking the migration to the cloud.
Consider a Monitoring Service
You should contact a service to monitor your new cloud-based environment. An active directory monitoring service like Stealthbits can constantly watch the integrity, security, and performance of the cloud environment to ensure there are no problems after you migrate. Monitoring services can be invaluable for managing your cloud systems, users and data.
Plan Employee Trainings
You must prepare your employees for the transition. This means developing and scheduling training programs for all relevant employees. Create practical trainings that go over everything necessary for employees to access and use cloud services. You should also go over cloud security during these trainings since it could be very different from what employees are used to with passwords, access and other things.
Create an Implementation Roadmap
A final step should be to create an implementation roadmap. This is a comprehensive plan that lists who is responsible for moving different categories of your business into the cloud. Divide the migration tasks between people who understand each area of the business, and set timetables if possible. An implementation roadmap will make moving to the cloud much simpler and easier.
Cloud-based systems are dynamic, scalable, and accessible from anywhere. You do need to be careful during a migration to the cloud because you could lose data, or open up security gaps that might be exploited later. Following these steps and monitoring your new cloud environment will help to make the transition as seamless as possible.
