Don't Overlook the obvious when migrating to Cloud
Tracy Monday MCIM
Global Solutions Executive - Verizon, Co-Founder Xeocom, proud recipient of the Jill R. Mervin Business Leadership Award and Mentor on the Global Women Mentoring Programme
When it comes to Cloud Migration all too often with the need for speed and the race to cloud so many of the most obvious considerations are overlooked. The arguments for cloud are compelling, agile, competitive advantage, cost reductions, digital transformation..... the list goes on.
In a recent article in Cloud Computing, Andrew Larkin, Director of learning, Cloud Academy called out 4 critical areas that must not be forgotten. These were:
1. Not making security your No. 1 priority.
2. Forgetting that people will be the key enablers of any change.
3. Don't bring on-premises problems into the cloud.
4. Don't forget to factor in data transfer costs.
The order of priority or importance will depend on your business, however, I would suggest there is a 5th which should be the 1st consideration and comes in 4 parts:
What are you moving to Cloud?
Why are you moving it to Cloud?
Is it really worth rearchitecting the service/application?
and
Which Cloud are you moving it too?
Understanding both the network and underlying infrastructure as well as the cloud infrastructure is vital to any successful cloud migration or adoption strategy and unpicking or patching a bad deployment can be more costly than you first think.