Moving to the cloud can feel like a minefield. Especially when there are so many options out there. How do you ensure that your existing applications don’t fail or data is not lost? That’s where a cloud readiness assessment comes in.
What is a cloud readiness assessment?
A Cloud Readiness Assessment recommends the best approach for moving your applications, storage or hosting to the cloud. Typically a provider will examine every part of your existing systems, processes and usage to set out a migration path that is designed specifically for your business.
The five stages of a cloud readiness assessment
A cloud readiness assessment covers five core areas: priorities, applications, data, processing and usage. In this article I’ll briefly cover what is involved at each stage.
1. Understanding your business priorities
Reasons for moving to the cloud vary from business to business. To ensure we meet your expectations we need to know your objectives. What are you hoping to achieve from moving your application/storage/hosting to the cloud? A goal to reduce costs could result in a different cloud strategy to one that is about increasing the flexibility to scale resources.
2. Understanding your existing applications
What technologies are they using and how are they structured? The cloud readiness assessment determines how easily they be modified for the cloud. This will include recommendations for improving the scalability of applications as well as looking at any integration requirements. For example if you are looking to deploy new systems.
3. Understanding your business data
Next we assess the cost effectiveness of moving all of your data to the cloud. This is typically done by documenting how your applications/hosting/storage interacts with existing databases. What volumes of data do you need to migrate? This enables the efficient planning of the data migration part of your move to the cloud, without compromising security or downtime.
4. Understanding your processing requirements
At this stage it is necessary to interrogate the internal working of the system you want to migrate. How do your applications interact with external ones? Including any new cloud-based software you’re looking to adopt. If information needs to flow between them, this stage will drive the testing part of your cloud migration plan.
5. Understanding business usage requirements
A cloud readiness assessment goes beyond understanding your current users and usage volumes. You need to analyse how usage is expected to change in the short, medium and long term. Do you intend for volume/demand to fluctuate? And who will manage your resources? That way your migration plan will set out costs associated with the move to the cloud now as well as ongoing running costs.
Are you cloud ready? Why not get in touch to book your cloud readiness assessment today?
