6 Steps To Assess Your Business Cloud Readiness

Tue, 28 Dec 2021 12:00:00 -0500

According to a report by Flexera, 36% of businesses have increased their cloud spending to $12 million in 2021. While increasing your cloud budget is important, most businesses overlook their cloud readiness when they plan migration.

A cloud readiness assessment is your first step when migrating to the cloud. It ensures a seamless cloud migration by analyzing your applications and resources. But how to know if your business is ready for the cloud? Follow these steps to prepare your business for successful cloud migration.

Why Do You Need A Cloud Readiness Test?

The cloud readiness test provides you a gap analysis between your business requirements and the applications you want to move to the cloud. The readiness test also has further advantages, such as:

Strategy development for your complete migration process.
Budget allotment depending on the type of migration strategy chosen.
Risk mitigation by understanding the likely disruptions during migration.
Prioritizing stability to ensure minimal impact on operational continuity.

Steps To Cloud Readiness Assessment

You can use various tools to assess your cloud readiness. However, you must cover all three aspects of migration: server, infrastructure, and application. These aspects can be broken down into the below 6 steps for a complete assessment.

Determine your migration goals

For cloud migration, answering the "why" is important to determine the "how." Depending on your business objectives, a suitable strategy can be selected. Your migration goals can include reducing IT costs, increasing data security, or even staying ahead in the competition.

Among companies that already use cloud services, 42% chose remote data access, 38% chose disaster recovery, and 37% chose better flexibility as their top reason for cloud migration.

If your goals aren’t well-defined, the migration won’t accomplish much. Determining your objectives early on can help you in the further steps, such as risk mitigation and budgeting.

Analyze current IT infrastructure

All your applications and data don’t need to transition to the cloud. Similarly, your current infrastructure might be lacking in some areas. Analyzing your on-premise data centers helps you determine which applications can be retained and which needs to be re-programmed.

Technologies that are scalable and have a high volume of usage are priorities during the transition. Some applications contain subcomponents that are analyzed and treated differently. During the assessment, correctly grouping such components is essential.

The assessment also needs to cover all your technologies, right from the operating systems to application databases. Understanding the functionality of each application is crucial in determining the right migration strategy for your business.

Determine the budget

For more than 47% of companies, cost optimization is a huge reason to migrate to the cloud. While cloud migration does help with cost-cutting, not planning your budget can lead to more spending than savings. In the last few years, businesses have increased their cloud spending. More than half the companies spend nearly 50% of their budget on cloud services.

Your cloud budget depends on several aspects: the type of cloud you choose, the amount of data, the volume of usage, and server management. Certain applications cost more when they transition to the cloud. Similarly, other applications work better on the cloud.

Public, private or hybrid cloud

Choosing the right type of cloud server will be the basis for your migration strategy.

A public cloud is a shared infrastructure service that organizations can use on a pay-as-you-go basis. These are more affordable servers and make sense for companies that have varying workloads. Small businesses that are just starting with the cloud or have a little budget can opt for the public cloud.

Private cloud servers are expensive but dedicated servers, often used by only one organization. Businesses that prioritize data security need to implement private cloud servers as they provide complete control over the applications.

Hybrid cloud combines both private and public cloud to create a customized cloud server for a business. Instead of treating all the data as the same, the hybrid cloud determines the best transition strategy for each application.

According to Flexera, 87% of enterprises use a hybrid cloud for their business. Use your migration goals and IT infrastructure assessment to decide the right cloud service for your business.

Understand the risks

According to Vormetric, 85% of the companies store sensitive data on cloud servers. Therefore, any organization that migrates to the cloud needs to prioritize security measures. Your on-premise data centers might already have security mechanisms, but security on cloud servers works differently.

The risk of unauthorized access to data is higher, especially with public clouds. More than half of the companies using cloud servers implement encryption, multi-factor identification, and other security measures to protect their sensitive data.

Your security assessment should also include disaster recovery mechanisms. After analyzing your data, choose the security measures that align with your business requirements.

Select a strategy

Depending on how easily you can transition your current IT infrastructure to the cloud, there are several migration strategies you can choose from.

Lift and Shift: This is the simplest strategy where your applications are directly shifted from on-premise storage to cloud storage. This has minimal impact on your operational regularity. Most companies use this strategy for at least some of their applications.

Refactoring: Refactoring optimizes an application for cloud-based usage. While the ‘lift and shift’ method only uses cloud servers to store data, refactoring enables the application to complete its computation within the cloud server itself.

Replatforming: Replatforming is the combination of the above two strategies. While it stores data on cloud servers, it also includes some modifications to the applications to streamline it for the cloud. Since replatforming also uses on-premise storage, you can start small and scale effectively.

KriyaGo: Your Trusted Cloud Migration Service Provider

Finding the right vendor is as important as choosing the right strategy. At KriyaGo, we prioritize client requirements to create customized migration strategies. Our cloud transition services help you move from on-premise data storage to cloud servers seamlessly.

Combine it with our software specialization and premium consultancy services, and KriyaGo becomes a one-stop solution for all your business requirements.

Choose seamless cloud migration. Contact KriyaGo!

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