20 Questions to Ask Yourself When Considering a Cloud Migration

For the past several years, you have probably been looking into ways to maximize efficiency through automation and continue to help your organization’s bottom line by reducing capital spending and ongoing costs. You already know the cloud is the answer, but you may not know where to begin or how to gain adoption across all departments of the organization. The first thing you should do is capture your plan (or at least the reason for needing a plan). Let’s get you started down the right path by playing a little game of 20 questions.

1. What does a cloud initiative mean for your organization?
2. Where does your business want to be in the next 3 years? What revenue, products/services, and/or employee growth goals has the company set for itself?
3. What market trends or customer demands have influenced the future direction and goals?
4. What strategic goals does the company have for the next 12 months?
5. What tactical plans have been put in place to meet these goals? Tactical plans involve things like hiring, investments in infrastructure, technology, research, and marketing campaigns.
6. What are the known risks of the plan?
7. What workloads/applications do you feel are best to be placed into public cloud resources versus remaining on premise in the future?
8. How do I get others on board with this initiative to be sure all are collectively supporting the corporate goals?
9. How does one implement this change while minimally impacting the day-to-day operations?
10. How long does it take to implement a cloud strategy? A true cloud strategy plans for the future of your company and while implementation can happen quickly, it is really something that takes into account where you want your business to be 3-5 years from now.
11. How does moving to the cloud help protect the business through business continuity and disaster recovery?
12. How will moving to the cloud help the business improve the services it provides to our customers? By partnering with a cloud service provider, you will be able to roll out improvements to services such as MS Office 365, G Suite, Box, etc. more often and without needing to bring systems down or schedule service outages. By handing over the burden of updates to cloud providers, you can shift your focus from operating the services to integrating the services for your business’s specific needs. This also means you’ll get to work more directly with your customers who use the services and assure their satisfaction.
13. What are your business objectives for moving to the cloud? Moving to the cloud can benefit many, if not all aspects of your company, and it certainly will impact all departments. You will need to decide how important these objectives are to the success of your business. Are they all equally important, or can you rank them?
14. Who is responsible for securing your cloud, and the data inside it, and what tools are being used to monitor and validate that security?
15. How will business operations become streamlined once you move to the cloud? Decide how much cloud automation you want to have/expect to have and take a good look at your current applications for compatibility or changes that will need to be made.
16. What level of resiliency do you need? How long can you afford to be offline or without software and systems?
17. How much is a cloud transformation project going to cost from start to finish? Many people assume that the cloud is automatically cheaper than what they are using now. Calculate your costs – for preparation, migration, and ongoing utilization.
18. What regulatory or geographical obstacles might occur? Prior to beginning a cloud transition, research regulations that might hinder workloads or otherwise prevent public cloud usage. Hybrid architectures can alleviate some of these challenges and allow you to strategically separate where you host sensitive data.
19. What are the available resources to support a cloud migration? Do you have a team in house to perform provisioning, migration, and support tasks or do we need to look to others for assistance?
20. Do you need flexibility in your cloud to add controls of your own?

Involta has a solution for you. We have partnerships with Amazon Web Services®, Microsoft Azure®, and Google Cloud Platform® enabling the flexibility of choosing the optimal public cloud provider that meets your needs. Additionally, we have a full team of proven industry experts focused on cloud design, change management strategies, governance and implementation. We continue our commitment to cloud hosting and managed services that serve your organizational needs as well.

Involta is here to partner with you and your organization, providing you the peace of mind knowing you don’t have to go at this alone. We are here to help you answer the uncertainty and provide the clarity specific to your organization.

To learn more on how your organization can begin your partnership, call us at 855.364.3061 or email at sales@involta.com.