A Cloud-based infrastructure will not only enable you to launch new products (internal or external) quickly, but it will also give you the ability to innovate faster and deliver better experiences to your customers.
Moving your workloads will also allow your team to access documents from anywhere, at any time. Doing so will lead to improved productivity across the organization — a key in supporting the multi-location nature of many of today’s businesses and the mobility of your workforce.
In this post, we’ll explore the steps you need to take for successful application migration to Cloud.
Application migration to the Cloud: Defining your business objectives
The first step to moving your workloads to the Cloud is to develop your business case for migration. You need to consider your business objectives, along with the current applications in your infrastructure. Determine what you want to achieve with your migration and what metrics you’ll track to measure your progress.
At this stage, it’s important to highlight which services are compatible with your Cloud migration strategy and which ones aren’t. Be sure to prioritize the services and workloads that will bring immediate benefits to your business units.
Below are two common-use cases for Cloud migration:
1. Speed up Development and Testing
It’s often difficult and time-consuming to set-up complete development and testing environments on a traditional infrastructure. By moving development and testing to the Cloud, your organization gains the ability to move fast, and gain on-demand capacity in a cost-effective way.
2. Modernize existing applications
Companies using legacy systems often have to spend days or weeks making minimal changes to their applications. For major changes, that time could extend to months. Cloud computing not only reduces the time needed to make changes, but it also provides a scalable platform for your existing legacy applications.
Find a Cloud solution that fits your goals
Once you’ve outlined your business objectives, the next step is to decide whether you want to move your workloads to the public Cloud, private Cloud, or hybrid-Cloud.
The Public Cloud refers to computing services offered by third-party providers over the public Internet. These services are often sold on-demand and customers only have to pay for the capacity they use. Amazon AWS and Microsoft Azure are two of the most popular public Cloud solutions.
Unlike the public Cloud, the private Cloud contains compute resources that are only accessible by a single organization. Private Clouds are highly secure, and ideal for organizations that regularly handle sensitive customer data subject to regulations such as HIPAA and PCI.
Hybrid-Cloud combines the capabilities of the private and private Cloud into one solution. Using a hybrid approach for your workloads is usually the best option as it gives you both the scalability of the public Cloud and the security of the private Cloud.
If you are a Microsoft-centric enterprise, like many of our customers, and have on-premises servers running Microsoft and other applications, the hybrid-Cloud allows you to retain value in your current investment while scaling out to the Azure Cloud, through Azure Stack.
Three Key Benefits of the Azure Stack Hybrid Cloud include:
Unlock greater business value
You can process data locally in Azure Stack to address your latency and connectivity requirements and then add your data to Azure Stack for further analytics. This capability enables you to make better decisions and unlock new business value.
Meet regulations and compliance requirements
Based on your specific technical and business needs there are some cases where you’ll need to host different instances of the same application to Azure or Microsoft Azure Stack. With Microsoft Azure Stack, you can develop and deploy these applications in Azure without changing any code.
Update your existing infrastructure
Azure Stack allows you to implement an effective DevOps process within your organization by giving you access to containers, serverless computing, and microservices architectures capable of updating and extending your legacy applications.
Pick the right tools
Choosing the right technologies will improve the effectiveness of your Cloud migration strategy. Select technologies that will support your business objectives and your Cloud hosting options, and consider the security of your data when moving workloads to the public or hybrid-Cloud.
An effective way of increasing the security and the efficiency of your application migration to Cloud is to use technologies that automate manual migration tasks. By removing these manual migrations from your process, you will not only increase your security, but also reduce your project costs and the likelihood of human errors and delays.
Get your stakeholders involved
The last step to application migration to Cloud involves getting stakeholders in your company onboard with your decision. Consult with all departments that will be affected by the migration as well as your end-users.
“Initial discussions should involve all stakeholders, from C-suite executives to end users, as well as IT and line-of-business managers, software developers and third-party vendors. Getting executives involved early heads off objections later on, and it’s always helpful to explain why the organization has chosen to migrate to new systems. The IT department, with its technology partners, must also play a big role to ensure that critical operations are not disrupted.” says Brian Sullivan of Accenture.
Reasons to Partner with Pointivity
If your company doesn’t have the resources to execute a full Cloud migration strategy, you can work with Pointivity to increase your time-to-value and guarantee a successful initiative.
- Deploy fully-managed virtual environments so that IT departments can focus on IT strategy, supporting core business applications, and creating competitive advantage.
- We help determine the right Cloud strategy specific to your needs.
- We help determine the right applications and find the right price as a result.
- We help determine the right implementation.
- We provide after-implementation support.
- We are a Microsoft Partner of Record.
Migrate Your Workloads
As a Tier 1 COSN and CSP partner in the Microsoft Partner Network, Poinitivity offers multiple platforms so you can choose to run workloads where it makes sense for your business.
We leverage our knowledge and more than 15 years of Cloud hosting experience to help you choose the right Cloud solution.
 | Public Cloud with AzureOver 100 Services, 42 Global Regions, 62 Compliance Offerings |
 | Private Cloud with PointivityEnterprise-class control with dedicated resources and full HIPAA & BAA, EU Safe Harbor, and SSAE 16 SOC 1 compliance. |
 | Hybrid CloudConnect Your On-Premise Data Center To The Cloud |
 | Office 365Work Anywhere, Anytime, On Any Device. |
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