Tip of the Week: 3 Ways to Minimize the Chance of Cloud Migration Failure

Moving to the cloud is not an easy task, and it’s certainly not a process that will be the same for every SMB. Therefore, you need to be open to adaptation as the process wears on. Unplanned-for issues might make it difficult to adhere 100 percent to your plans, so if you can’t adapt to that which you can’t predict, your cloud migration is doomed to failure.

InfoWorld discusses this scenario in length: “For example, a large enterprise that migrates 100 applications to an IaaS cloud might discover during testing that the latency is too high for 25 of the applications. The board of directors and leadership were given a plan showing 100 applications migrating to the cloud, and no one wants to communicate a change, so they power through. The result is that those 25 applications don't function well enough to support the business, and that adds up to a big, costly failure.”

The idea is to acknowledge that your plans may need to be altered, and to change them as such before it becomes a major loss for your business. The appropriate response, as indicated by InfoWorld, is to not move those 25 applications to the cloud. Instead, it’s best to not rush this matter and instead focus on moving them so that they can function properly upon virtualization. The only problem is that there’s more to take into account, like your IT budget. This makes implementing new solutions slightly inflexible--just enough that even the slightest mistake can derail implementation.

Provide a Sense of Autonomy
While you may feel the desire to oversee a project one step at a time, it’s best that you don’t. You should entrust the project to whoever’s sole responsibility is to manage your technology solutions. The more hands that are on a project, the more hurdles that the administrator has to go through in order to get the cloud migration finished without incident. You should be able to get IT projects done without having to run every little decision by the chain of command.

Evaluate and Test Accordingly
It’s important to realize that your organization will probably experience problems, and that you need to handle them as they occur. Examine how progress is being made and alter your business’s approach to cloud migration based on how well it’s doing. The idea is to address potential problems before they happen, so that you can avoid expensive downtime and delays in the project’s completion.

Make Adaptation an Accepted Practice
Your business needs to see the ability to adapt as an asset. It’s one thing to discover a flaw in a plan, but another entirely to find resolutions and swiftly work toward resolving it. This means that you need to do your part to foster this type of acceptance in the workplace. When something goes wrong, don’t point fingers and try to find the one responsible for it; encourage your team to discover the resolution.

If you need assistance with a cloud migration, Washington Works can help. Our skilled technicians can work alongside your IT staff to guarantee that your cloud project goes off without a hitch. To learn more, reach out to us at 301-571-5040.