How to Minimize Stress When Migrating to the Cloud

It doesn’t matter how often you move or where you are moving to, moving is stressful. There are so many questions to be answered, like:

• What if something breaks?
• How will this impact my commute?
• What is it going to cost?
• How safe is the new neighborhood?

Moving applications to the cloud can be just as stressful as moving house and raises some of the same questions:

• What if something breaks?
• How will this impact performance of the application?
• What is it going to cost?
• How secure is the cloud?

Whether moving house or moving applications to the cloud, you need to weigh the pros and cons, then cross your fingers and hope for the best; but thankfully, there are steps you can take to make sure moving to the cloud goes as smoothly as possible. It doesn’t matter if you are looking at an IaaS, PaaS, or SaaS provider, these steps can help you along the way.

Baseline Current Environment

First, determine which applications make sense to move to the cloud and where the users are located. How will moving the application to the cloud impact users? Will there be more or less latency? How does the application currently perform? Can the corporate network support the additional bandwidth requirements of users accessing applications across the internet that used to be accessed locally? If you don’t know the answer to these questions, do some research and get the answers. Gather real user measurements to see how your applications are performing currently to determine the impact of migrating to the cloud.

Assess Solutions

Once you know how the target application performs and have identified potential providers, it is time to see how they perform. An application in the cloud should perform the same as or better than it did previously. Having slower page load times and reduced availability makes for unhappy users. Collecting RUM data at this point typically isn’t possible, but performance data can be collected with active monitoring. Test from locations that are representative of your user base – don’t test from only a single geography if your customers are coming from all over the world.

Monitor and Optimize Service

After a solution is chosen and the application has successfully migrated to the cloud, it does not mean your work is done. Now you need to make sure the SLAs that were agreed to when you selected the cloud provider are met (You do have an SLA, right?). Don’t leave it up to the provider to tell you that everything is going smoothly.

Migrating to the cloud can be scary and stressful, the more prepared you are the easier it will be.