More and more businesses are realizing the flexibility, elasticity, and cost saving opportunities that the cloud provides. As such, companies are moving from on-premise IT environments to the cloud at increasing rates. Many major cloud providers such as Amazon Web Services and Microsoft Azure have plenty of documentation and tools to simplify the migration process.However, for an IT department (or a singular employee tasked with IT operations management) with limited experience with the cloud; moving to the cloud can be a daunting task.
Here are a few ways that a managed IT services provider can assist your business with cloud deployments and migrating items from on-premise to the cloud:
Mapping Out a Plan of Action
Proper planning is the most important step a company needs to take before migrating to the cloud. Often, companies put together a haphazard plan and then run into many speedbumps and issues when trying to move from an on-premise infrastructure to a cloud provider. A managed IT services provider can assist with mapping out a plan of action of which items to move to the cloud and when. Having years of experience migrating multiple clients to the cloud, the managed IT services provider knows the most efficient methods of moving an office to the cloud; and can plan accordingly.
Minimizing Interference with Day-to-Day Business
With effective planning your managed IT provider will map out how to move items from on-premise to the cloud without creating major interferences with day-to-day operations. Your IT services company will work with you to identify non-essential items that can be moved to the cloud first. Then they can set up plans to run migrations of major components (like email or data storage servers that get accessed daily) to the cloud after regular business hours or during the weekend. As the migration is completed, the managed IT provider will make sure that accessing data and processes in the cloud is as simple and easy as accessing the same information when it lived on-premise. A highly effective cloud migration is one where your employees don’t even notice the move from on-site to the cloud. A managed IT services provider can help your business achieve this.
Ensuring On-Premise to Cloud Adaptability
When you move major components to the cloud, you need to make sure that they transfer over completely. For example many times when moving a database from an in-house server to the cloud, an administrator needs to check to make sure that the data fields in the on-premise database map 100% accurately to the cloud database instance. If something doesn’t get migrated over properly, it can mean loss of data and/or major hiccups when trying to run the database in the cloud. As each component moves from on-site to the cloud, your IT services provider is standing by making sure each piece arrives safely to the cloud and operates as efficiently (if not more) than it did when it was living on on-premise equipment.
