Globally, the cloud computing market will surpass $1 trillion by 2028. If you are about to become a part of this statistic, you want to set yourself up for agility, scalability, high availability, and costs savings with cloud migration.

While moving to the cloud helps you leverage technology for several benefits, migration is fraught with complexities and it must be carefully planned to take into consideration the existing infrastructure environment, complexities, and whether those workloads are architected to run the same way on Cloud. It is important to understand the estimated cost of migration, the ROI (Return on Investment) of running those workloads in the Cloud, and more importantly correctly making cost calculations with informed inputs.

Establishing a strong business case and setting migration goals lay the foundation for a successful migration. By success, we are not looking at a smooth technical shift alone, but long-term objectives including business goals, efficiency, cost optimization and growth. This is where a cloud assessment gains significance.

The Importance of the Cloud Migration Assessment

A cloud assessment is a deep dive evaluation of an organization’s cloud readiness based on best practices and needs in the context of the business. The assessment approaches migration taking into account stakeholders, workloads, existing IT infrastructure, processes, security and governance, resources, budget and cost estimates.

Know in detail the ways to prepare the organization for cloud migration  

The assessment helps understand risks that will influence the design and methodology of the migration plan. If the readiness assessment is overlooked, migrating to the cloud can become more complex than anticipated.

5 Things the Cloud Assessment Helps You Achieve

1. Identity the best strategy  

Before you migrate to the cloud, it is important to establish what your goals are. This includes capturing baseline metrics of your IT infrastructure so you can map workloads to assets and applications. A clear understanding of where you are starting from will help you set key performance indicators (KPIs) for your cloud migration, such as page load times, availability, responsive times, CPU usage, memory usage, and conversion rates.

Your migration strategy should be developed early on, with a focus on business objectives over technology. These metrics will help you measure success across several categories.

2. Choose what to migrate  

Choosing what to migrate involves a serious consideration of the criticality of the application, production status, data requirements, business and technology considerations of the application, compliance requirements, dependencies and integrations.

Not all apps are best suited for the cloud. Some apps may perform better when migrated to a private or hybrid cloud instead of a public one. Others may only need minor tweaking while others may need more in-depth code changes. It is always best to do a full analysis of architecture, complexity, and implementation before beginning the migration process rather than after everything has been transferred over.

As you evaluate, do keep the following questions in your mind:

Which application requires re-design, and which will move as-is

If re-design is required, what would be the level of complexity

Can your cloud provider offer migration services without reconfiguring workloads

The ROI and time consumed for each application you will be moving

Choose a cloud environment – multi, private, or public cloud

Before choosing the environment, it is important to consider the cost and security implications for each

3. Preserve operational continuity and data integrity  

Maintaining data integrity is crucial to any business, especially when migrating to the cloud. Data loss or corruption can cause significant downtime and negative publicity, so it is important to take measures to ensure that your data is unharmed. Operational continuity is also key to successful cloud migration. Downtime can be costly, so it is important to plan for a smooth transition to the cloud by ensuring that all critical systems are up and running before making the switch.

4. Audit your IT infrastructure & review performance  

Conduct an audit of your IT infrastructure to assess your organization’s readiness for cloud migration. Analyze your applications in terms of usage and capabilities to determine which ones can be migrated to the cloud. Consider the adaptability of each app and how well it will fit into a cloud environment.

When reviewing your plans to port applications, data, and systems to the cloud, make sure that they can be rearchitected to meet customer expectations. This will help ensure that your transition is successful and that you continue to provide high-quality service.

Also read: Quick Guide to Migrate Microsoft SQL Database to AWS Cloud

5. Estimate Cloud Spend  

Estimating cloud spend will help with budgeting and prioritizing applications to be migrated that would bring cost benefits on cloud. Evaluate direct costs which involve cost for hardware, licensing, servers and so on. Indirect costs are not directly associated with the hardware or technology and involve spend on resources, probable downtime, training, operational expenses etc. Depending on the type of migration, refactoring costs might apply. The cost of the cloud environment on a monthly basis along with the spend for services, cloud storage and the cloud vendor (if applicable) are estimated.

Accomplish a Successful Cloud Migration with Noventiq  

Planning, implementing, and concluding a successful cloud migration is no easy feat. However, choosing to dedicate the proper time and resources necessary is not without reward. Successful cloud migration can provide your organization with additional security, flexibility, modernization, and cost savings.

At Noventiq, we help organizations with their cloud initiatives by providing digital transformation solutions that enable businesses to optimize AWS cloud and data analytics for growth and innovation. Our team of experts works with organizations of all sizes to help them strategize and migrate applications and data to the cloud quickly and securely, and to leverage Cloud Migration, Managed Services, DevOps, Data and Analytics, Cloud Security and Cloud Native Applications for achieving business outcomes.

Learn more about the Noventiq Cloud Migration Assessment.