Moving to the cloud is nothing new. It is everywhere and will continue to be everywhere because it can save money, reduce complexity, enhance availability, and so much more.
But cloud migration is not simple. In fact, cloud migration is extremely complex. Why?
Because there are many unknowns.
Here are some cloud unknowns that you may face or have already experienced in a cloud migration.
Vendor acquisition, change of policy, price or anything that causes your cloud provider to be different in a way that affects your current cloud strategy.Ex: This stuff happens all the time. Providers change their business approach, policy, or become acquired. There are even dedicated websites to track all the cloud provider mergers and acquisitions. In some cases, (cough* cough* Verizon) cloud providers give you very short notice of when they are shutting down their services all together. This article shows a couple months of notice.
- Who owns the data? Though this is somewhere in the that 25-page contract it often gets missed and is an unknown until it becomes critical information.
Ex: Say you want to move some data back to on-prem for one reason or another. Does your contract say that you own your data and can move it back? What is the procedure and cost to move?
- Success of migration. This unknown is very important.
Ex: Sometimes cloud migrations fail. Maybe it is because your expert engineer on the project suddenly left your organization, maybe your organization took an unforeseen financial hit and budget was stripped. Maybe the data, solutions, workflow being migrated became much more complex than anticipated and time, patience, or whatever it may be ran out. At the end of the day, be ready for anything.
So how do you know the unknown? It is simple, you can’t.
What you can do is PREPARE for the unknown.
We like to call this a CLOUD EXIT STRATEGY. Every Cloud Migration Strategy and Plan should absolutely include a Cloud Exit Strategy. When going to the cloud fails or there becomes an issue with the selected vendor or there was change of policy, price, management, etc. you will need an exit strategy. Basically, a Cloud Exit Strategy is a detailed, comprehensive plan on what you will do and how you will do it if you need to migrate from your original cloud provider.
A Cloud Exit Strategy entails many things. Maybe this means moving back to on-prem datacenter? Or moving to a different cloud provider and/or a little of both? Maybe it is moving your data from IaaS to SaaS? The point of an Exit Strategy is to be prepared for the unknown just like having Disaster Recovery protocols and solutions.
If you do not have an exit strategy, have failed going to the cloud before, or want a second opinion of your current Exit Strategy give your Cloud Migration experts at Bird Rock Systems a call today.
We have helped many of our customers successfully move to the cloud as well as saved our customers money, time, and a whole lot of headache by building out a cloud exit strategy during the Cloud Migration Strategy process.
Give us a call or email us for all your cloud migration needs at info@birdrockusa.com or 858-866-9702.
