8 Best Practices for Successful New Cloud Deployments

We look at key steps CIOs should take to ensure that they end up on the successful side of the cloud adoption curve.

Clearly define the transformation of your IT to a cloud-based infrastructure as a strategic project for the business—never, ever, as an “IT project.” You must also define the scope of the project by taking inventory of the applications you have and the ones that will be needed in the future to run the business.

This is a two-step process. First, get rid of the applications and workloads no longer needed to avoid moving existing inefficiencies to your new cloud environment. Next, assess each application and determine which type of cloud (public, private or hybrid) would be best-suited for each.

Consider not only how much money you can save but also try to characterize the benefits of increased agility. It’s also worth looking at how much your company will be doing for the environment by leveraging more efficient cloud solutions.

How big of an application do you need to move to consider it a win? How much do you need to save? How many servers do you need to decommission? Don’t forget to consider performance metrics and end-user satisfaction criteria.

This should be implemented during the migration to the cloud and that can be followed, even when you are fully operational. This includes appointing a technical account manager (TAM). Whether to automate tracking plan performance is one of the key decisions that needs to be made.

You will need to find a cloud service or managed services partner (MSP) that can co-manage the migration project with you and offer a truly efficient consumption-based approach (IaaS as a pure utility service). Do the due diligence and talk to other customers of the candidate you are considering to check on performance.

Your cloud provider must offer a package that accounts for the performance requirements of the applications to be moved, meets the highest standards of security, provides built-in high-availability and disaster-recovery capabilities, and ultimately is able to manage both infrastructure and applications based on predefined service-level agreements. Be aware that not all MSPs offer these features.

Effectively plan the migration and then test the plan thoroughly so that during your cutover weekend, the planned outage is as short as possible. On Monday, when the users come back, the only difference they should notice is that their application is running faster.