In just a few months, the cloud ceased to be an option that offered companies the potential to save costs or increase productivity and became the object of desire, the indispensable ally to guarantee business continuity, promote resilience operational or provide the necessary flexibility so that collaborators could work at any time, from any place and with any device without affecting the results.

Many companies had to quickly review their infrastructure strategies: agility has become the new key for companies with the will to survive and stay competitive in an increasingly uncertain and changing environment. How to take the step without succumbing in the attempt? Of course, there are proven strategies that ensure a higher probability of success in the cloud migration process.

Success patterns

Much of the success of a cloud migration project lies in its preparation. For now, it is essential that the leadership team is convinced of the need to migrate and that it is fully aligned with the project. One of the great barriers to cloud adoption continues to be cultural. So this conviction on the part of executives – who ideally should also be sponsors of the initiative – is a key element in reducing resistance.

All the team involved must be properly trained and informed of the changes expected and the impact that this migration will have on their day-to-day work.

The second recommendation is to define aggressive goals that force the organization to move quickly. For example, it is possible to select a group of applications and decide to move them to the cloud on a certain deadline. Even if that goal is not reached 100%, everything done along the way will serve as quick learning to apply in the next waves of migration.

In the same way, it is important not to freeze: overanalyzing each application and each workload trying to figure out how to migrate to the most remote workload prevents us from starting to move forward and gain experience. Not everything has to be established in the first plan: it is feasible to advance little by little, starting with the simplest applications or those that will generate a quick return, and leverage from there to later, with the knowledge acquired, proceed with more complex projects.

From assessment to migration

The first concrete step towards the migration to the cloud is the evaluation: build the business case, analyze the different processes in search of gaps and opportunities for improvement, and establish which one should attack first. It is also recommended to map the applications that are currently hosted in the data center. It will be an experience of discovery: those responsible will find applications that did not even know that existed. In all cases, the criticality and dependencies must be identified.

The second step is mobilization: once the current outlook is known, a migration plan with structured priorities is developed – which application should be migrated first, which can be left to the last minute. Then the architecture is defined, training plans are established and all the restrictions that may appear are considered, including regulatory compliance and security measures.

What follows is the migration itself: there will be companies that will want to keep the cloud in charge and there will be others that will prefer to outsource it through a technology partner.

This is often believed to be the end of the road, but this is a common misconception. It is just the beginning of a cycle with enormous opportunities for optimized operations, 

replacement of obsolete systems, and continuous modernization. Upgrades are always at hand and accumulated experience allows them to be capitalized.

The migration to the cloud is, literally and metaphorically, a one-way street for companies that are committed to fully enter the future of business.