How to migrate to the cloud.

As work-from-home and hybrid work environments have become more common, many businesses have begun transferring their existing applications to cloud-based strategies. This is called cloud migration. It makes your working environment more flexible and improves many areas within your business, such as cost-effectiveness, performance, and accessibility.

• How can my business benefit from migrating to the cloud?
• What challenges might my business face while adopting the cloud?
• How can I efficiently transfer my data to the cloud from an existing application?

As mentioned above, on premises cloud migration can greatly benefit the way your business operates, shifting some of that heavy technological lifting from your IT department to a large server specifically designed to handle a variety of infrastructure requirements.

One of the major benefits of migrating to cloud based computing is having the ability to scale your infrastructure based on your current needs. With cloud infrastructure, you don’t need to install more on premises equipment; the cloud can take on more or less depending on what you need.

Upon migrating to the cloud, the amount of time and money you’ll spend on troubleshooting will likely decrease. Cloud based providers take over dealing with the maintenance and upgrades of your servers, so you can spend more time focusing on innovation and running your business smoothly.

With a variety of robust cybersecurity measures in place, cloud solutions protect your data better than most on premises servers. Their sturdy firewalls, data encryption, and frequent updates help keep your data safe. Cloud solutions also copy your data to a number of data centers, providing backups that may not be available for smaller, on premises data centers.

Cloud migration can reduce server latency and improve your end-user experience. With your data on the cloud, your business will see a greater degree of accessibility to both your employees and your customers. Cloud based solutions can also increase performance by scaling up and down to manage different levels of throughput.

While there are a slew of benefits to migrating to the cloud, this process doesn’t come without challenges. In the process of cloud migration, you’ll likely be transferring vast quantities of data from your on premises data center to the cloud. This poses the threat of possible data loss or corruption—but in most cases, that’s a relatively small possibility. Once your data has migrated to the cloud, it will be backed up on multiple data centers. It’s important to note that cloud migration may also interrupt your systems while data is transferring, so be sure to plan accordingly.

Additionally, after migrating to the cloud, you may experience vendor lock-in. This occurs when your business has needs that deviate from what a cloud provider offers. Once you migrate to a provider, it can be cumbersome to perform a cloud-to-cloud migration. Luckily, the solution to vendor lock-in is careful assessment of your business needs and developing a working cloud migration strategy.