What is cloud transformation: How to prepare for the transition      

Today businesses benefit from the on-demand availability of computer services that has become possible thanks to cloud computing. Although many organizations have already adopted cloud technology, many haven’t embraced it and consider it a key enabler.  

In this guide, you will better understand cloud transformation, learn how to choose the right cloud provider, explore various migration strategies, and more.  

What is cloud transformation?

Cloud transformation that comes as a part of comprehensive digital transformation initiatives can be defined as a process of migrating the organization’s data, apps, and IT infrastructure from on-premises to the cloud. The reasons behind the process may be various: the need to improve business agility, cost efficiency, and scalability. Typically, such a transformation requires careful planning, the appropriate resources, and a comprehensive strategy. The readiness of the business to transform should be carefully assessed, proper tools and providers should be chosen, and a roadmap developed.  

Cloud transformation offers manifold benefits for enterprises as well as challenges and risks. Let’s take a look at the key benefits and then proceed to the challenges.  

Need to develop a cloud app? Explore our services. 

Benefits of cloud transformation

It is correct to identify the benefits and values driven by cloud transformation for each organization individually. While the typical advantages are apparent, some differ from organization to organization. To define yours, you should ask yourself the following questions: 

• What are the reasons we would like to move to the cloud? 
• What business goals does the company want to achieve? 
• Does cloud transformation align with other strategic priorities? 

By answering these questions, you’ll better understand why you need to start the transformation process and what outcomes it will bring at the end of the cloud transformation journey, specifically for your company.  

1. Business agility. Depending on your business needs, the cloud allows fast resources scaling up and down, providing utmost flexibility to your enterprise on demand and enabling it to react promptly to shifting market conditions and industry requirements.  
2. Cost efficiency. Being in the cloud means you can significantly decrease investments in software and physical infrastructure and optimize costs for their maintenance. Businesses can easily use only the resources they need, utilizing SaaS products with the elastic usage model where you pay only for the uptime of the solution.  
3. Enhanced collaboration. Cloud-based tools facilitate productivity and efficient teamwork. 
4. Improved security. Cloud security mechanisms improve disaster recovery capabilities, minimizing data loss and downtime. And you don’t have to do much to implement these things since it is the cloud provider who takes care of security issues and provides encryption key management, access and identity control, data loss management, zero-trust cloud-native architecture, and other services and tools. 
5. Automated IT operations. Cloud providers handle the responsibilities of software updates and hardware maintenance, whereas IT teams can focus on more strategic activities and initiatives.  
6. Vast storage facilities. The foundational capabilities of the cloud augment your data storage capacity exponentially, eliminating data silos and allowing for advanced data management to boot. 
7. Boosted app development. Cloud environments do not only enhance the operation of the migrated applications that form the backbone of an organization’s digital infrastructure. They also allow for the fast and efficient creation of new apps with high developer productivity to augment the company’s ecosystem.  
8. Regulatory compliance. For banking, fintech, healthcare, insurance, and other verticals, adhering to stringent sensitive data protection regulations is a must, which might lead to hefty fines and administrative penalties if neglected. Cloud service providers guarantee their cloud platforms are totally compliant with GDPR, CCPA, HIPAA, and other industry standards in the domain of security and compliance.  
9. Support. Round-the-clock customer service and technical assistance often come as a part of a cloud services package offered by vendors.  

When all taken together, these boons provide a significant competitive advantage to businesses that embrace cloud technologies. However, being on the cutting edge of the latest thinking in the IT realm, this innovation poses serious challenges during its implementation. 

Read a related article: Cloud-based application development: Step-by-step guide

Challenges associated with cloud transformation

While making cloud transformation a staple of your future-oriented business strategy, you should consider the following bottlenecks: 

• The need to ensure the appropriate security 
• Migration complexity caused by various factors, for example, legacy systems may require the substantial update 
• Imminent data model rearrangement since the architecture of your on-premises data bank may differ from the one the chosen cloud facility has 
• Moving data in big quantities is a complicated procedure that takes quite a time to complete 
• The need to properly allocate the budget for cloud migration 
• Difficulties in finding skilled staff experienced in cloud platforms 
• Resistance to change across the organization 
• And more 

To check what particular challenges your company has, contact our cloud transformation consultant.   

Preparing for cloud transformation

Assessing organizational readiness for cloud transformation is a critical step in ensuring a successful and seamless transition. Here are 4 important things that must be considered: 

1. Necessary resources and skills 
2. Strategic roadmap developed by professionals 
3. Potential challenges  
4. Current company’s state audit 

Besides, clear objectives for the transformation should be defined, as well as a cloud strategy developed.  

An organization can enjoy the results of cloud transformation to the maximum if it partners with a cloud provider that will be the best fit for it. How can you understand which cloud service provider is just what the doctor ordered?

5 tips for choosing the right cloud provider 

We prepared some valuable tips for you to choose the right cloud provider.  

Tip 1. Firstly, you should identify your organizational needs and goals. Determine non-functional requirements such as scalability, performance, security, etc. These steps will help you narrow the list of potential vendors. 

Tip 2. Search for a cloud vendor with a proven track record. Consider their data center infrastructure, disaster recovery capabilities, and service level agreements (SLAs) to ensure your business-critical applications and data will be accessible and protected at all times. 

Tip 3. Evaluate the provider’s security protocols, encryption standards, access controls, and compliance certifications. Ensure they meet industry standards and regulations specific to your organization, mainly if you deal with sensitive customer data or confidential information. 

Tip 4. Compare pricing offered by different providers. Along with the costs, it’s nice to check other essential factors such as storage, data transfer, and additional services you might need. 

Tip 5. Seek customer reviews not only on the vendor’s website but also on special listing platforms that display the overall information about the company. There, you may find some unbiased feedback from customers who used the services of a given provider. 

Identify the suitable migration strategy 

Our article related to the cloud-transformation topic describes fully some of the most popular migration strategies (from Azure and AWS), roadmaps, and best practices. Read it carefully to understand the peculiarities of each approach, and don’t hesitate to contact our cloud migration consultants for free consulting.  

You will hardly choose the appropriate way by yourself as each approach is unique and requires professionals to work according to it. For example, AWS offers their famous application migration strategies named “the6 Rs”: refactoring, rehosting, re-platforming, repurposing, retiring, and retaining.  

A professional vendor will recommend the right strategy according to your infrastructure’s requirements, business goals, and current state.  

Related article: How to create a successful cloud migration plan

Migrating — a major stream in the cloud transformation program

The main goal of this stage is getting the app migrated to the cloud. To move to the cloud, most companies follow a standard migration roadmap. 

Let’s discover more details about each stage of the migration process.  

Step 1 – Assessment 

For a successful cloud journey, you should get a complete picture of your current standing. To do it, you should make up a comprehensive inventory of all your IT resources, including on-premises infrastructure (such as servers, hardware, environments, etc.), databases, and software programs. The key deliverable of this stage is a meticulous ecosystem dependency map, where all integrations and interconnections of components are exposed. 

Step 2 – Planning 

A detailed cloud migration plan is a mission-critical element of the entire cloud transformation strategy. Why? Because it establishes clear goals before participants, ensures business continuity with the interruption of business processes and downtime kept to a minimum, and safeguards the quality of data earmarked for relocation.  

Creating a plan should begin with the following questions: 

1. What migration strategy to choose? 
2. If multiple apps are migrated, what will be the order? 
3. How will the transition from one migration to another be organized? 

Once your strategy is formalized, you can plan the cloud infrastructure. The future-state infrastructure should be visualized to map out what hardware and software you need and how those will interact with each other. 

To define further if the migration process is a success, it is also crucial to establish key performance indicators (KPIs) to assess user experience and engagement and such metrics as lag, page load time, conversions, etc. 

Step 3 – Pre-migration 

The coal-and-ice preliminary steps include estimating the budget to be allocated for migration, appointing a team of experts to conduct the procedure, choosing cloud integration depth for enterprise applications, backing up the data, determining the cloud type (single or multi-cloud), opting for a vendor with the optimal cloud capabilities and reasonable pricing policy, implementing risk management measures (anticipating potential contingencies, delays, data corruption, transformation errors, and the like), and defining migration schedule with major milestones.  

Security is another important thing to pay attention to before starting the cloud transformation process. Professional cloud services providers create strategies to ensure a secure transformation. It may include such methods as data encryption, data loss prevention, prioritized compliance, etc. 

Step 4 – Migration 

During it, data is extracted from the source system with the help of an ETL or ELT method, transformed, and loaded into the destination system. As a vetted cloud migration expert, DICEUS recommends starting small and relocating simple apps with few dependencies. If they prove to operate well, you can move on to migrating larger systems, all the time exercising real-time monitoring of the progress and addressing issues on the fly if they crop up.   

Step 5 – Post-migration 

When the transition is completed, you should test the new environment thoroughly to make sure it runs smoothly, and its performance lives up to your expectations. The major success benchmark is the set of KPIs you established at the planning stage. While all this QA routine is in progress, consider the parallel functioning of the old and the new system until you are absolutely sure that cloud-based products operate satisfactorily and can disable the old one.  

Step 6 – Optimization 

After all data and software are transferred to the cloud environment, you should ensure its seamless functioning. To do that, you should track the migrated systems’ performance in real-time by monitoring basic metrics (downtime instances, data accuracy, etc.), red flag problems that require immediate attention, and tackle them promptly. Also, you should regularly analyze feedback from end-users to pinpoint underperforming solutions and capabilities and improve their functioning. The consistency of your optimization efforts critically depends on scrupulous documentation of every aspect of the migration procedure and keeping a detailed log of all related transfer processes and data transformations. 

Step 7 – Management 

Since cloud technologies are constantly evolving, it is vital to provide proper management of the newly-created ecosystem and its efficient usage by employees across all departments. It can be achieved via continuous learning of the personnel in the course of comprehensive training programs and workshops, enabling both managers and rank-and-file staff to navigate the cloud-based environment confidentially and creating a universal buy-in towards the implemented transformations. Also, you should offer stakeholders a wide range of self-help resources (troubleshooting guides, product docs, video tutorials, instructional articles, etc.) to let workers hone their skills on their own.  

As you see, cloud migration is a no-joke endeavor requiring professional expertise and a qualified workforce. To complete it smoothly, you should hire competent specialists with an in-depth experience in this domain. 

How DICEUS can help you 

DICEUS is a strategic partner for cloud transformation with 13 years of experience. Our team provides the following cloud-related services: 

• Cloud assessment and strategy 
• Cloud migration 
• Cloud optimization 
• Cloud security 
• Cloud governance 
• Other cloud-managed services 

To build and operate cloud-based applications and infrastructure, we use the following technology solutions and services:  

Here is our cloud tech stack. 

Infrastructure Layer: Amazon Web Services (AWS), Microsoft Azure, and Google Cloud Platform (GCP)  

Platform Layer: Heroku, OpenShift, and Google App Engine  

Application Layer: applications built and deployed on the cloud infrastructure and platform layers  

Management and Monitoring Layer: Terraform, AWS CloudFormation, and Azure Resource Manager, Datadog, New Relic, AWS Identity and Access Management (IAM), Azure Active Directory, and Google Cloud Security Command Center, Jenkins, GitLab, and CircleCI  

Our tech stack is not limited to the abovementioned list, as DICEUS is a technology-agnostic company. We believe there’s no ‘one size fits all’ solution in the IT industry, and we are open to working with clients to determine the ‘right software’ solution that best fits their business needs. We never propose any tech stacks until we clearly understand the client’s business goals and context– and only then do we propose the most appropriate tech solution. So, feel free to contact us and discuss your requirements. 

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