What to know for your cloud migration.
Protect your data with these key migration practices.
Your data is one of your business’s most significant assets. It helps you make business decisions, it helps you communicate with customers, it holds your employee’s information, it both shapes and stores your budgets and projections. Most businesses need quality, accessible data to make important steps in their business, whether it’s in marketing or managing inventory. Managing and protecting your company’s data is one of the top priorities of your organization.
Moving your data to a cloud storage form of data management has become increasingly popular with businesses for many reasons, including improved data analytics and some enhanced data security features, depending on the type of cloud storage your business decides to utilize. If your business is considering migrating from an internal or on-site storage solution to a cloud-based system, here are some cloud migrations considerations to solve for before making the switch.
Have a Plan
The biggest cloud migration strategy issue to tackle is making sure you have a roadmap to taking your data from one place and moving it to another. Having a plan is essential to making sure that you don’t lose data, commit any breaches of privacy, or have a lot of downtime in the day-to-day operations of your business that could ultimately create a loss of revenue or unhappy customers. When creating your plan, make sure you answer these questions:
- Who will handle the migration? Over what period of time?
- How long will you prep data backups for?
- Will you have to suspend business hours to complete the transfer?
- What are your plans for your current storage solution?
- Have you identified the best cloud solution for your company?
- Will your cloud provider be able to answer any questions or issues?
- Do they have any on-site assist capabilities they offer?
Once you have answers to these issues, you can begin to sketch out an outline for the migration.
Create Backups and Plan B
Once you have a cloud migration project plan that includes steps and timelines, you’ll want to have a data backup plan. Having a “plan b” that includes steps to take if the process doesn’t go as planned, as well as, a full record of backup data, is one of the key cloud migration considerations when moving data.
Even if your plan is rock solid and you have excellent staff in place, mistakes can happen, and errors can be made. Ensuring that all your data, no matter how non-essential, is backed up to a secure location, can help safeguard not just the overall success of your migration but continued success for your business.
When your business is planning a migration to cloud services or moving infrastructure to the cloud, you may be initially very enthusiastic about making the switch and seeing if the cloud creates more opportunities for your business, but it’s important to go through the cloud migration process slowly and methodically to reduce errors and loss data.
Has your business had to handle any cloud migration considerations when moving data? What did you consider the most important or difficult steps?
