Organizations that undertake the process of cloud migration can realize impressive benefits including tighter security, lower total cost of ownership (TCO), and improved agility, efficiency, and scalability.
However, the road to achieving these benefits can be complex and risky. Businesses face significant challenges as they transition resources to the cloud, including cost management, data security and compliance, and an overall lack of sufficient strategy and planning.
To ensure success in your cloud journey, it can be beneficial to turn to a skilled consultant for support in your cloud strategy, architecture, migration, and optimization.
Cloud Migration consulting, things to know:
- What is Cloud Migration?
- What Does a Cloud Migration Consultant Do?
- Responsibilities & Services of Cloud Migration Consultants
- When Should You Hire a Cloud Migration Consultant?
- 7 Ways Cloud Migration Consulting Can Help Your Business
- Types of Projects Cloud Migration Consultants Work On, With Examples
What is Cloud Migration?
Cloud migration is the process of moving data, applications, and other digital business elements from a local data center or private cloud to a public cloud or between public cloud providers.
A cloud migration strategy should include a plan for transferring data, applications, and workloads, as well as a plan for testing the migration, ensuring security, and monitoring the performance of the new cloud environment.
What Does a Cloud Migration Consultant Do?
A cloud migration consultant is responsible for helping organizations develop, implement, and manage their cloud migration strategy. They also leverage their expertise to make recommendations on cloud service models, tools and technologies, and deployment options.
Cloud migration consultants provide organizations with further guidance on the best practices for migrating data and applications and help them to understand the financial and operational implications of their cloud migration strategy.
Responsibilities & Services of Cloud Migration Consultants:
- Understands the benefits and drawbacks of each of the cloud service providers and their offerings
- Determines the type of migration that best fits an organization’s business objectives and will save them time and expenses
- Provides guidance on Change and Project/Program Management
- Deep understanding of the “Well-Architected” frameworks of the target CSP (Performance, Security, Networking, Auditing, Data Engineering, DevOps, Disaster Recovery/Business Continuity)
- Roadmaps your organization’s cloud journey and provides realistic expectations on timing, cost, and success factors
- Skilled in assessing and remediating potential risks and roadblocks
When Should You Hire a Cloud Migration Consultant?
You should seek cloud migration consulting support when looking to move your data and digital assets from a private cloud to a public cloud or between public cloud providers. Cloud migration holds risk and requires a thoughtful strategy that accounts for differing requirements across your organization, security and compliance needs.
Additionally, more than 90% of enterprises overspend in the cloud, and the expertise of a consultant can help you identify opportunities to reduce costs while improving performance and infrastructure scalability.
As the Proverb goes, “The best time to plant a tree was 20 years ago. The second-best time is now.” The best time to enlist cloud migration consulting support is as soon as your organization decides to prioritize a cloud-hosted infrastructure. The next best time is today.
6 Ways Cloud Migration Consulting Can Help Your Business:
- Migrating your digital assets to the cloud leveraging a strategic and comprehensive approach
- Saving you time and expenses by identifying the cloud provider and type of migration that best fits your business objectives
- Building cloud infrastructure automation that ensures a scalable and repeatable process, creating an environment that is maintainable and enforceable
- Optimizing your cloud environment to ensure your business takes full advantage of the improved agility, efficiency, and scalability that the cloud offers
- Simplifying and accelerating the cloud migration process
- Creating learning & development paths, ensuring your team has the capabilities to maintain the shift to the cloud
Types of Cloud Migration Consulting Projects, With Examples
Cloud consultants can work on diverse projects involving cloud architecture and migration, optimizing cloud resources, and leveraging best practices across leading providers such as AWS, Google Cloud, and Azure.
Let’s look at one of AIM Consulting’s previous experiences as an example of the types of projects cloud migration consultants are often tasked with. For a more detailed look, please see our Cloud Migration case study.
Example of Cloud Migration Consulting Project:
The human resources information systems (HRIS) division of a major global travel company faced a hard deadline to migrate a legacy data application into the AWS cloud. While other IT groups within the company possessed sufficient knowledge to set up this environment, HRIS was wary of exposing sensitive employee data to workers outside its division.
AIM’s cloud architect led the engagement beginning with a discovery phase, helping to demystify the cloud by introducing concepts like Lift-and-Shift, Infrastructure as Code (IaC), Cloud Scalability, and DevSecOps.
In the implementation phase, the cloud consultant began migrating the solution using these foundational concepts, involving the client team more as the project evolved and serving as a subject matter expert (SME) for AWS.
After testing the lab/dev environment and getting the security design review for the production environment approved, the consultant deployed the network in the Amazon Virtual Private Cloud (VPC), then guided the team in migrating the production servers via CloudFormation templates using lessons learned from the lab/dev environment.
The consultant highly emphasized DevSecOps best practices during implementation, following the company’s enterprise risk and security (ERs) protocols. Once the project was fully handed off to the internal client team, the consultant conducted a knowledge transfer phase and provided a roadmap of recommended elements to ensure the organization’s continued success.
This project resulted in an expertly architected legacy data application running in production in AWS, embedded with security and managed by a well-trained internal team.
Need Help Realizing the Benefits of the Cloud?
Our expertise in cloud, apps, and managing organizational change results in a comprehensive approach that not just supports you in managing the transition but ensures that your business takes full advantage of the improved agility, efficiency, and scalability that the cloud offers.
Contact us today or learn more about our cloud migration services.
