A good process is the key
to successful cloud migration
The Starting Point
As for any journey, a clear understanding of where you are today and your current situation is essential. We spend time with you baselining and evaluating your current IT environment and user requirements. You don’t want to necessarily migrate bad practices from on-premise to the cloud, nor do you want to lock yourself out of new productivity features. By establishing a solid understanding of the breadth and detail of your existing IT services, we can ensure that nothing is left unconsidered or left behind during a migration process.
The Possible Future
The cloud platforms have a wealth of service offerings…typically far more than you could access from on-premise environments. That challenges and inspires thinking about how you may use new platform services to operate more effectively, to offer users new functionality, or to introduce greater resilience. Thus we can take a clean sheet of paper and consider not just migrating like-for-like services to the cloud but we can jointly contemplate a better way using new capabilities available from the cloud platform.
The Chosen Path
Stitching together a map from current position to future state can be as easy as one step thanks to new migration tools for elements such as email. Or it can be a multistage process where different workloads are migrated in sequence with various dependencies and precedents. We work closely with you and your users to evaluate a path that minimises impact to the business as well as mitigates risk. We document this Project Plan as well as a Test Plan and your sign-off ensures alignment between all parties on the strategy.
On the Journey
Following the well constructed plan from earlier, our engineers work through the systematic process of migrating your services to the cloud platform(s). Our Project Manager oversees the process and maintains an ongoing engagement with you for status updates, risk evaluation and acceptance testing. We have defined roll-back strategies and gates along the way to ensure the project is kept on track to agreed outcomes. Often the process can occur in discrete stages over a extended period to minimise disruption and permit progressive testing.
The End Result
Once deployed into the cloud several things will change. Firstly your commercial model pertaining to cost and consumption will undoubtedly change, and be more aligned to your business. Secondly your scalability and agility will be materially enhanced as your business morphs and changes. And thirdly, the option to access new technologies and services means that you will have a clear pathway to continuous improvement on which we are dedicated to working with you.
Putting your head in the cloud can be a very liberating thing!