Thinking of moving ahead with your plans for cloud migration? Great! But before you get stuck in, there’s one vital thing you should do to help it all progress successfully: ensure you understand your goals.
Shifting to the cloud is undoubtedly one of the smartest moves businesses can make. There are so many benefits – from reduced costs to enhanced security – that in many cases, it’s an obvious choice.
However, that doesn’t mean you should move to the cloud without giving it any thought.
It’s important to remember that there’s no single, ‘correct’ way to approach a cloud migration. In fact, there’s an almost never-ending list of ways that you could make it happen. And the best method for you will all come down to why you want to shift to the cloud in the first place. For example, consider a cloud migration strategy for businesses primarily wanting to save money and minimise use of resources. This will probably look a lot different to a strategy designed to boost scalability, or enhance workplace innovation.
So before diving in, it’s important to think about why you’re doing this, and to understand your reasons for making the change. This can help you create a plan that will deliver the most suitable results.
Identifying your goals
To understand your goals, you first need to identify them. And one of the biggest mistakes that businesses make during cloud migration is that they look at goals solely from an IT perspective.
Getting your IT department involved in the process is, of course, a smart thing to do. But successful goal-setting means taking into account the needs and opinions of those all across the organisation. For the cloud to deliver exceptional business outcomes, it needs to bring value on a broader scale. So it’s always a good idea to get everyone involved, and better understand their expectations.
Leveraging the power of goal-setting
You may have heard that there’s a ‘right’ way to migrate to the cloud, and a ‘wrong’ way. But it’s not as simple as that. The ‘right’ way when dealing with an old on-premises server that’s lacking in security, for example, may be to move quickly, and optimise after the fact. On the other hand, the ‘right’ way to migrate for performance may be to take it slower, optimising and testing as you go, and addressing any performance issues during the migration process itself.
This is where understanding your goals can help. When you’ve identified and set your goals for the migration, you can leverage the power of these insights to help you build the most effective strategy. You need a clear vision about the type of value that you want your new cloud environment to deliver, and where you want the cloud to take you. It then becomes easier to develop a roadmap that aligns with your goals, and ultimately helps to keep you on the right track for migration success.
Set yourself up for success
Identifying and understanding your goals should be one of the very first things you do when building a cloud migration strategy. When you’re laying the best possible foundations, you’re enabling a successful outcome. But remember that goal-setting is not the only critical step. You’ll need to consider planning, implementation, priorities, refinement, and more. And this is where our Project IT Service can help, keeping the project running smoothly from plan through to delivery. To find out more get in touch with us today.
