If you are asking dexelop to help your company to move to the Cloud, probably you have understood all the benefits related to this choice.
So where should you start from?
Executing a migration is a complex and delicate project, and as such it should have a formal project plan. The migration plan should track tasks, durations, resources, costs, and risks.
dexelop tested this process with many clients and can guarantee a flawless result.
1. Assessment of Infrastructure, Services and Applications
Assessing Infrastructure, Services and Applications is very important and requires a initial phase that will involve System Administrators, Business Managers, Developers but also Users.
We will focus on identifying all the risks related to the Migration process.
It often makes sense to start with the lowest-risk applications—those with minimal customer data and other sensitive information—or applications that take advantage of the cloud’s elasticity.
2. Build a Business Case
Developing a business case for migrating your infrastructure to the cloud requires an overall cloud computing strategy and specific information that describes the current state and demonstrates the advantages of cloud computing.
Of course it is important to reduce costs but we will focus on delivering meaningful business value.
During this phase we will focus on evaluating Cost Analysis, Service Levels and Business Impact associated with the migration.
3. Develop a Technical Approach
Broadly speaking, there are three potential target service models for the migration of an existing infrastructure/ service/ application – Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS), Platform as a Service (PaaS) and Software as a Service (SaaS).
dexelop will focus on what to migrate and how. As an example. Suppose that your company has an application that works on SQL Server Database and you have a Physical Server based on Windows Server 2012 to run SQL Server Standard. There are two options of course. One is to migrate it to a Virtual Machine on Azure (IaaS) and the other one is to get rid of it and use SQL Azure Database (PaaS).
What's best? It depends on many factors. dexelop will help you with choice.
4. Adopt a Flexible Integration Model
It is common for an infrastructure being migrated to a cloud service to have connections of various kinds with other applications and systems; therefore, the application owners need to understand the impact of these connections and address it.
In many cases, the challenge is not so much “integration” as it is “re-integration” or “maintaining the integration” between pieces of the entire system that are coupled in a certain way.
So it is important to adopt a Flexible Integration Model. Flexible models for combining data across disparate systems are essential for successful integration. These models are expressed in XML schema (XSD) in Web service–based systems, and instances of the model are represented as XML transmitted in SOAP messages.
5. Address Security & Privacy Requirements
In dexelop's experience security and privacy are two of the issues that concern cloud service customers the most. Depending on the sector, these may be just above or below concerns about availability and performance as highest priority.
At the same time, cloud service customers should remember that many of the security and privacy concerns raised by cloud computing have existed since the first forms of IT outsourcing were introduced.
Of course we will focus on all the aspects related to Security and Privacy of the Cloud Infrastructure also explaining all the actors how the migration to the cloud will change the way they will manage their Files, Data or Applications.
6. Manage the Migration
After all the previous phases are complete dexelop will begin with the actual migration.
So next steps will be:
- Deploy the Cloud Environment
- Install and Configure the Application
- Harden the Production Environment
- Execute a Mock Migration
- Cutover to Production Cloud.
