How to Make Your Business’ Cloud Migration More Effective

The cloud is a great business tool and resource, enabling businesses to offset a lot of their IT workload onto these providers. If you haven’t migrated some or all of your business’ technology to take advantage of the cloud, it is certainly something to consider.

If you’re already considering it, we wanted to offer a few tips to help make the process more effective for you.

Determine How Much You Plan to Rely on the Cloud

The beauty of cloud services is that it isn’t an all-or-nothing prospect—today’s businesses have the flexibility to utilize the cloud for as much (or as little) as best suits their needs. Therefore, this is a critical step to consider as you proceed with your cloud migration. Determining your intended use of the cloud and the scale of your needed migration will help shape how you approach it.

Figure Out the KPIs You’re Most Concerned With

When dealing with a cloud migration, there are numerous KPIs—key performance indicators—to keep in mind. These KPIs will help you determine how well your migration is going, showing you potential issues before they have undue impact on your process. The KPIs you should keep track of include the following:

• User Experience - This involves things like how long pages take to load and how long any lags are.
• Application Performance - How often are your cloud applications erroring out, or aren’t available for your team to use?
• Infrastructure - What percentage of your business’ potential CPU and memory usage is being expended, and how well is your network performing?
• Business Engagement - How effectively are you converting prospects to clients, and how engaged are your prospects and clients with your business?

Keep in mind, this is a very short sample list of the KPIs you should track.

Determine Your Baselines for These KPIs

In order for you to have data to compare your post-migration performance to, you should take the KPIs you’ve selected and collect current data that applies to them. While this can be done relatively quickly, it is better to commit some time to this and collect data over a longer timeframe to preserve its accuracy—the more data you have, the less impact any odd outliers will have on it. Once you have this data, you’ll be able to take the same measurements after your migration to determine the return you’re getting.

We Can Assist You with Your Cloud Migration 

Reach out to us for help in managing the minutiae that this process demands and requires. Give us a call at (217) 428-6449 to find out how we can help.