Insights

Migrating to the cloud? You need a cloud assessment

Author: Derek Ruth

Ready to ditch the datacenter and migrate to the cloud?

You’re not alone. In a study conducted by O’Reilly in January 2020, more than 88% of the organizations surveyed have already adopted cloud to some extent, with most expecting to grow their usage in the next year. Furthermore, around 25% of companies said they planned to move all of their applications to the cloud within the following year. And with the recent upswing of remote workers, cloud adoption will escalate even further.

Moving to the cloud makes good business sense, delivering benefits like increased agility, scalability, and cost savings. Furthermore, with the transformative opportunities provided by AI, ML, IoT, and other advanced technologies, there’s never been a better (or more critical) time.

Of course, migrating to the cloud is easier said than done, particularly for larger organizations.

There’s the business side of things: stakeholders, business objectives, mission-critical processes, and budget. You’ve got to identify and deal with interconnected workflows, legacy applications, industry regulations, and data security. Then, there are existing equipment investments, licensing, network requirements, SLAs, and more.

Understanding and planning around these and other complex variables and dependencies are critical to helping ensure a cost-effective, secure, and successful migration to the cloud.

Which is why you need to invest in a cloud assessment. Below, I’ll share with you what a cloud assessment is, how it can benefit you, and how Beyondsoft can help. If you have questions or want to learn more, be sure to give us a shout.

What is a cloud assessment?

A cloud assessment is a comprehensive, best practice-driven evaluation of your organization’s cloud readiness and needs, both now and in the future. The assessment looks across your business, stakeholders, processes, workloads, and existing IT investments. It delves into areas such as security and compliance requirements, current and future needs, internal IT talent, budget, and estimated costs.

The result is a comprehensive migration plan, which includes a roadmap customized to your needs and budget and predicted return on investment.

How does a cloud assessment benefit you?

Moving to the cloud can be a worthwhile undertaking—especially if you’re set up for success from the start. A comprehensive cloud assessment can help you do this.

Ensure your strategy aligns with business objectives

You need more than an executive mandate to move to the cloud. You need a strategy that supports business needs, now and in the future. A cloud assessment involves stakeholders across the business to understand and accommodate current and future needs and use cases as well as budgets to make sure that your cloud strategy aligns with your business.

Reduce risks

The larger your environment, the more complex your migration effort—and the higher the risk. Gaining a comprehensive understanding of your environment—including infrastructure, applications, data, licensing, warranties, processes, and workloads—is critical to making sure that no detail gets overlooked, minimizing downtime and ensuring end-to-end security.

An assessment also looks at industry standards and regulations to keep your business in compliance. Finally, an assessment looks at your organization’s people. One of the most significant risks often comes down to people and not having the right skillsets. Ensuring you have the right expertise is critical to avoiding costly issues and delays.

Get a realistic cloud migration roadmap

There are many moving parts to migrating to the cloud and plenty of questions to be answered, such as: which platforms make the best business sense? Do you need a hybrid solution? What is the scope of the project? What workload should you migrate first? How will you manage the environment?

And the list goes on. These are some of the pressing questions that get answered during a cloud readiness assessment. Having a realistic, clearly defined roadmap helps facilitate a smoother migration, setting you up for long term success.

Are you ready to move forward with a cloud assessment?

As a strategic IT firm, global enterprise customers have trusted Beyondsoft for more than two decades—including the world’s top technology companies. As proven experts in cloud computing technology and cloud migration, we can help you reach your business goals and make your cloud journey a successful one. We partner with our customers to design robust business processes that can adjust and scale according to changing business needs. We offer proven expertise in all the top cloud platforms, including Amazon Web Services, Microsoft Azure, and Google CloudPlatform.

To learn more about our cloud advisory services, including Cloud Readiness Assessments, contact our experts today.