How to Migrate Your Business to the Cloud Cost-Effectively

If you haven’t done so already, you should seriously consider migrating over to the cloud. Making this switch will be sure to benefit you, your employees, and your business in a number of different ways. It’ll provide you with an added layer of data protection, it will help you to remain abreast of regulatory compliance requirements, it will offer you enhanced scalability potential, and it will make you more flexible with regards to the task of accessing important information and data.

When you do decide to migrate to the cloud, it’s important that you take the cost of the switch into account at all times. If you don’t actively seek to migrate to the cloud in a cost-effective manner, you could end up paying way over the odds to move your data from one system to another.

Fortunately, advice on how to keep your expenses down in this instance can be found below. Here’s what you must do if you want to migrate to the cloud in as cost-effective a fashion as possible:

Calculate your costs before you make the switch

If you don’t want to end up paying over the odds for your cloud migration, you have to calculate your costs before the move gets underway. To calculate the true price of migrating to the cloud in an effective and error-free manner, you must:

• Address the following cost categories: current, application, and infrastructure
• Make a qualitative financial estimate of your cloud architecture
• Consider the cost of moving your data and/or system (choose between a ‘lift and shift’ approach or a complex refactoring approach)
• Build a timeline for your migration and take ongoing costs into consideration
• Recognize the fact that you will have post-migration costs to pay as well

Choose a trusted cloud vendor

The cloud vendor that you choose to migrate with will either help you to keep your costs down, or they will add on unnecessary surprise charges and make this whole endeavor way too pricey. To ensure that you align yourself with a vendor that can be trusted to help you migrate in a cost-effective manner, you have to do your research and shop around.

To select the right cloud vendor in this instance, you must:

• Vet all potential vendors and ensure that they have the right certifications and meet the correct standards
• Ensure that they offer you a genuine service roadmap
• Check to see what data governance and security services they offer
• Perform background research on your chosen vendors to ensure that they have performed in a productive and reliable manner for businesses of the same size and stature as yours

Get maximum value out of the cloud

To ensure that you don’t waste any money when you migrate to the cloud, you should seek to maximize the value that you get out of this technology. To get the most out of the cloud, you’re going to have to be highly effective when using it on a day-to-day basis. You can achieve this by seeking assistance from a security solutions expert such as Bytes whenever you run into any trouble and maximizing your storage space by leveraging referrals plans and promotions whenever they are on offer. Other ways to do so include:

• Integrating your cloud-based document management system with your email.
• Investing in Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS), as this will allow you to own your infrastructure to a fraction of its usual price, thus eliminating the need for you to shell out on general maintenance and upgrade costs.
• Purchasing a hybrid cloud solution as that will allow you to better manage periods of peak load.
• Make sure you include disaster recovery as part of your cloud plan, as this will enable you to protect your assets, files, and documents when disaster strikes.
• Be sure to leverage all the data-centric encryption that you are offered.
• Resolve to maintain your referential integrity at all times.
• Keep your cloud updated so as to ensure that it continues to process quickly and effectively.

Cloud migration is definitely something that you should consider if you’re serious about taking your business to the next level. If you don’t want to spend any more than is necessary on your migration, however, then you need to remember all of the advice listed above. Should you put it all into practice, you’ll be able to migrate to the cloud in the most cost-effective way possible. And all that extra money that you save can then be invested back into your business’s ongoing growth!