Migrating to the cloud is the process of moving your digital business presence, software and applications into servers accessed over the internet. Cloud infrastructure from the big providers like Microsoft and Amazon is hosted in server-packed data centres spread across the globe.
By leveraging a “cloud” environment, your business eliminates the burden of managing physical infrastructure, maintaining its availability and backing everything up. This promises huge benefits for companies who want to run their IT, rather than have IT run them.
Yet, when moving to the cloud, besieged by all the solutions on offer it’s no surprise that business’s struggle to know where to start, or even which clouds to consider. Cloud services are continuously evolving with new features and capabilities added weekly.
The ecosystem between the big players is highly competitive and this myriad of services combined with their constant evolution makes it difficult to know where to begin. Between planning and execution the terrain will undoubtedly have changed by the time you get underway.
Migrating to Microsoft Office 365 and Azure with Fuse Technology promises a rich user experience, secure and compliant infrastructure and, a scalable and performant platform upon which to build your business. But embracing the cloud can be daunting and staying secure, maintaining data integrity and seamless user experiences during migration is crucial.
Whether you’re dipping your toe in the water on your first cloud app or a veteran of multiple cloud transformations, having a cloud migration specialist like Fuse by your side can be the difference between realising the value of the cloud, and realising you underestimated its complexity.
Several challenges need navigating to ensure a successful migration:
- Migrating large data stores and databases – Technology use in business isn’t exactly new and whilst you’ve probably moved large data stores and databases before, it’s likely been between servers sitting side by side, in the same data centre. Migration to the cloud invariably means migration to a new data centre and that introduces throughput challenges. Even if your business isn’t large that doesn’t mean your data stores and databases aren’t. Small businesses can easily grapple with data stores and databases that are too large to feasibly transfer over the internet, where your link to the outside world is the limiting factor. Other methods involve shipping appliances to cloud data centres but whichever approach you adopt, it’s likely to be very time consuming.
- Moving away from legacy applications – Moving to the cloud creates the opportunity for a fresh start and tangible benefits are to be had leveraging a clean slate and newer feature set. If you’re moving between apps, cutting over is unlikely to be straightforward and specialist migration tools are needed to allow disparate systems to talk to one another.
- Data integrity and security – Even if your data makes it safely to the other side and not been leaked along the way, re-provisioning it, and ensuring it’s remains intact, with full chain of custody is also vital. Remember, this is likely to be the very same data that gives your business the edge and uniquely differentiates you from your competitors. Putting it all back together and making it accessible to your new cloud apps is no trivial matter and for industries that are regulated, having a partner that understands the compliance landscape and the tools to go with it is essential.
- Business Continuity –Migrating to the cloud is about improving the availability and accessibility of your business applications and ensuring your current systems remain continuously operational throughout the migration phase. There are multiple stages in any cloud migration where continuity can be disrupted and managing those risks is key. It’s wise to adopt a staged migration rather than a big bang cutover so as to reduce the impact of an unexpected hiccup.
By working with the Fuse team you’re working with some of the best in the industry. Our core engineering team built and managed one of the first true multi-tenanted cloud infrastructures in Australia, and indeed the world, more than a decade ago. Since then our team have assisted literally hundreds of clients of all sizes in effecting successful cloud migrations.
We can help your business set out clear achievable goals and build a feasible cloud migration strategy. We’ll safely and efficiently move your data, transforming it as required and overseeing a seamless cutover.
Key Benefits
- Leverage clear, unbiased experience for the most secure, compliant and efficient strategies to help your business ascend to the cloud
- Exploit the know-how of a team that have completed hundreds of cloud migrations from platforms of all kinds to clouds of all shapes and sizes
- Adopt a proven strategy that delivers a faster and simpler deployment of your apps and services
- Offload cloud purchasing, provisioning configuration, migration, project management, training and documentation offloaded to a team dedicated to ensuring your migration success
- Level the playing field between you and the competition accessing all the richness of features, performance, availability and scalability without the risks of going it alone.