Cloud Readiness Assessment Checklist to Simplify Your Journey to the Cloud

In the context of digital transformation, Cloud is often a priority for organizations to have a competitive advantage and to accelerate business operations.

Cloud migration; that’s almost synonymous to the cloud, as it is a process of moving organizations workloads to the cloud, which includes migration of people, process and technology.

Effective cloud migration begins with the right foundation. A pre-migration plan plays a crucial role in effectively moving the workloads to the cloud without any risks. A cloud readiness assessment can renovate organizations vague idea of moving to the cloud into a comprehensive plan that clarifies how to move data in a phased and planned manner without disrupting your business and it determines the order in which the events should occur.

Cloud migration is often complex and risky if not planned well. Compliance, cloud security, unclear business case, insufficient planning and operational readiness are some of the most common challenges that organizations face during their data transition to the cloud. To ensure a smooth migration, organizations must perform a cloud readiness assessment. This assessment must be performed by taking into consideration all the technical group and key stakeholders from the business groups.

Cloud Readiness Assessment:

A cloud readiness assessment is a process which determines the capabilities of an organization to migrate to the cloud, based on its resources and IT environment. This assessment helps organizations to set up a cloud environment that fits their business requirements. Cloud migration is often a considerable investment and needs lots of hard work from IT teams, a pre-formulated plan on how to move data or applications to the cloud can help organizations to reduce the time and money it takes to migrate.

Cloud Readiness “Things to Consider”

Before starting their cloud journey, organizations must evaluate all its operations. Organizations must specifically evaluate their people, process, technology and business, for readiness to migrate to the cloud.

People

A cloud readiness assessment starts with evaluating the People (technology staff) in the organization. It is important to understand the perspectives of the technical staff in terms of Tolerance to change, ability to learn new things and adopting the new ways to execute their jobs. A high-level assessment with the staff must include key areas such as their skills (particularly on cloud technology), exposure to technology, available time, and ability to adopt new technology.

Process

Cloud migration will certainly impact some processes of the organization such as compliance, governance, and security requirements. A cloud readiness assessment will help organizations to have a deeper understanding of the level of impact on such processes.

Technology

Assessing the current technology stack is the most tough part of the cloud readiness assessment journey. It is very important to have a clear understanding of organizations technology stack including infrastructure, data and applications to effectively assess the organization’s readiness in terms of technology. In this phase, a high-level assessment is needed to establish a plan or estimate on how many applications to be moved to the cloud and “how” the applications will be moved.

Cloud Readiness Assessment checklist:

Cloud migration is often a challenging process, moving workloads and applications can be risky at times. Following are the cloud migration checklist which helps organizations to have a smooth transition.

Define the organization’s cloud strategy

Before jumping into the cloud, organizations need to clearly understand what they want to accomplish. For this, organizations need to capture the baseline metrics of their current IT infrastructure to map workloads to assets and applications. This will help organizations to evaluate cloud migration key performance indicators (KPIs).

 Some of the key KPI’s can be the following:

• Page load times
• CPU usage
• Response times
• Memory usage
• Availability
• Conversion rates

The above metrics helps organizations to measure the application performance and user experience on the cloud.

Evaluate which applications to migrate

Not all the applications can be moved to the cloud, security and cost are the two major things to be taken into consideration on deciding which application belongs to the cloud.

The following are the few questions that need to be answered before evaluating which application can be migrated to the cloud.

• List the applications which can be moved as it is, and which applications need a re-design?
• Level of complexity for the applications which need re-design?
• Will the cloud provider allow the migration without reconfiguring workloads?
• What is the ROI for the applications that are planned to migrate to the cloud?
• Which type of cloud environment best suits the applications?

Establish a data migration plan

After assorting the applications that can be migrated to the cloud, organizations need to design a plan on how to move each and every asset to the cloud, based on the priority. A data migration plan must be made in such a way that the process of migration does not hamper the operational continuity and data integrity.

Select the right cloud provider

Selecting the right cloud provider is a vital part of the organization’s cloud migration journey. A cloud service provider should not be chosen just to accomplish the migration process but to get continuous support and security for the applications in the cloud. Today most of the service providers offer customized services and solutions as per every business model.

Following are some of the questions, organizations have to look into before contracting a cloud provider:

• What are the tools used for cloud migration?
• Level of expertise?
• Does the CSP support public, private and multi-cloud environments?
• Level of support provided during and after the migration process?
• How does it deal with out-dated technologies or complex architectures?

When looking for a CSP, organizations must look for a proven experienced CSP which can ideally deal with a global scale cloud migrations and which can manage complex tasks.

Migrate to cloud

After all the above steps are followed carefully, the final step is to migrate to the cloud. Depending on the architecture and complexity of the applications and data, organizations must decide on how to migrate to the cloud. One way is to shift the entire application to the cloud, then run and test to check the performance and then shift on-premises traffic. Another way is to adopt a piecemeal approach i.e.; gradually moving customers over, validating and then continuing the process till all the customers are moved to the cloud.

To allow organizations to gain value from cloud computing initiatives while addressing compliance concerns,Locuz Inc offers Cloud Readiness Assessment services. Through this assessment, organizations can identify sensitive or regulated content and notify key stakeholders including compliance officers, company executives, and administrators of any at-risk content. Once the initial assessment is complete, a best practices approach is outlined to separate regulated and non-regulated content or workloads, and subsequently migrate appropriate content to the cloud.