8 Steps to a successful migration to the Cloud
Cloud Computing is an emerging technology.

Some of its benefits are

• True scalability: You pay for what you use.
• Free of maintenance and upgradation hassles: the cloud provider handles those responsibilities.
• No long project implementations to set up. The cloud is ready when you need it.
• For organizations whose IT infrastructure needs fluctuate, cloud is especially beneficial.
• Digital transformation can be implemented faster by migrating your current IT infrastructure to the cloud. Cloud migration is an accepted strategy for many organizations.
• Long term costs and data/process security can be some of the considerations in favor of own physical infrastructure.
• Fortunately, it is possible to get the best of both worlds by combining own physical infrastructure with cloud. You can decide which applications and databases should be moved to cloud by cost benefit analysis and security considerations.
• Steady and incrementally growing IT infrastructure needs can sometimes be met more cost effectively by own IT infrastructure. You also may be more comfortable regarding security of your data and your digital processes on your own IT infrastructure.

There are multiple tools to perform workload migration. Some of the steps in migration are as follows:

Why you want to move to the cloud
Before you begin your migration, ask why you want to migrate your infrastructure to the cloud. Consider costs, benefits and risks for each major application and database.
It is a good idea to make a preliminary plan.

• What is your one time and recurrent budget.
• What resources in terms of experts and other key persons are you going to require.
• What are the constraints in terms of time available and the dates by which your transition must be complete.

ROI Analysis
When you have identified why you need to move to the cloud then you must do the balancing of advantages and drawbacks. Perform a very careful analysis of the money that you are going to invest and costs which you are going to incur periodically. Try to put a monetary value on all the benefits that you expect to receive.

Take inventory of applications and IT infrastructure
Before migrating to a cloud environment, you need to evaluate your existing IT infrastructure, list the application and other workloads to be migrated. Also, determine the components and resources required before proceeding with data migration. As per the business requirement you need to strategize the goals and objectives of the migration activity. Collect every information about the on-premises application and other data to be migrated.

If your systems are critically dependent on some tools and environmental components, then you must identify them and look at the special requirements of those components.

Cloud Partner Evaluation
Choose the right cloud partner. Microsoft Azure, Amazon Web Services, and other cloud providers and by choosing a certified partner we can surely make the difference between an effective cloud migration and unfortunate tragedies and setbacks.
Some key elements need to take care while selecting the right cloud partner that it should support tools public, private and hybrid environments at any scale and make the process easy.

Determine the right architecture to adopt
After evaluating the right partner, now it’s time to define the architecture to perform a cloud migration. While defining the architecture, make a list of your actual requirements and need to consider the storage requirement and computing power.

Plan the Migration
This is one of the important steps in migration activity as you have everything ready as per the previous steps. There are some important considerations need to take place as:

• Minimal disruption time
• Order of migration of applications
• Deadlines and tracking of key metrics to define a successful migration
• Changes to end-user processes because of the migration and any training required

Execute
Now as you have proposed the migration plan and now it’s time to execute it. So further steps need to follow:
Before you start the migration the first thing is backup your existing data, servers and other application data to ensure it is safe and retrievable after the migration. And now its time to migrate the existing data and servers to the new cloud setup. Once you moved all your existing data to the cloud then make sure that testing of all connections should be done.

When your data gets successfully migrated then with the help of regression testing you need to check whether your end users are facing any problems while using applications and accessing data.

Monitor the cloud services
As your migration is successfully completed, it is important to examine and identify any issues that might come up with the cloud environment and fix