Project Planning
Planning the transition to the cloud should involve everyone in the planning stages.
Start by building an overall application roadmap. During this stage we will want to consider scaling, demand fluctuations, cost and the overall effort required to transition applications.
“Cloud can simplify infrastructure management, allowing IT to take on a more strategic role in the business.” Mark Mincin, SVP and CIO Epicor Software
Identify skills and training needed of the staff, many will not have the skills needed. This would be a possible added cost should you need to hire “professionals.”
Determining our security needs will be the next important decision to be made. Knowing the type of data and the security needed needs to be determined from the beginning. We will want to identify existing security and compliance controls and ensure comparable controls can be implemented.
Monitoring cloud strategy is not a “set it and forget it” approach to IT. It is critical to determine what changes are needed from our on-premises to cloud environments over time. Continue to assess each workload to determine viability to run in the cloud as part of our overall cloud strategy and roadmap.