A successful migration delivers positive business and operational benefits with minimal downtime. It can reduce costs and help the business become more agile.

These are strong benefits and, as a recent IDG Enterprise Research Services survey found, around 78 percent of respondents claimed to have completed or were planning migrations from on-premise environments to the cloud.

Avoid Project Risks

However, the Project Management Institute found that only 69 percent of IT projects met their original goals and 39 percent failed because of inadequate planning.

The Harvard Business Review looked at migration in the wider context of digital transformation and reported that as many as 84 percent of businesses fail to meet their transformation goals.

If migration is so challenging, how can you increase chances of success? As research indicates, setting clear, realistic goals and carrying out careful planning are essential.

Set Realistic Goals

For cloud migrations, it’s important to work closely with business decision makers to identify applications and services that are both strategically important and suitable for cloud environments. Will cloud migration actually improve a process, and how will you measure success?

For example, moving an application to a cloud can make it more accessible to mobile employees. By using cloud’s scalability, migration can ensure customers don’t suffer delays during periods of peak demand, improving the customer experience.

Improve Planning

Migration planning and discovery are time-consuming, but automated tools can help reduce the burden and improve the accuracy of information available.

Tools such as VTG’s ZENfra^TM can reduce the time spent on tracking assets across all environments and create a single view. It can also keep the asset inventory up to date during migration by keeping multiple data-points for comparison based on date and time.

Careful planning also helps identify priorities and potential barriers to progress and success.

Deploy the Right Skills

Migration and ongoing management of cloud resources requires skills that may not be available in your organization. Lack of skills can put the timescale and the success of the project at risk.

Working with an experienced cloud provider can provide your team with access to skills and expertise, as well as guidance on the best way to tackle migration.

Manage Projects Efficiently

The information available from automation tools like ZENfra™ provides an accurate picture of the current infrastructure and its interdependencies, strengths and weaknesses. That information can be used to create a migration action plan.

The tool creates management tasks and takes care of notification and reporting to simplify project management. Based on the action plan, ZENfra™ generates custom automation scripts that help reduce time to completion.

Minimize Downtime

While migration is an essential step to digital transformation, slow progress can cause downtime and disruption to the business, as well as inconvenience for customers. A successful migration identifies the potential causes of downtime and eliminates them through high levels of automation, efficient project management and use of the right skills.

By minimizing migration downtime, organizations can achieve the benefits of cloud while maintaining business as usual.

Find out more

If you would like to know more about ZENfra™ or our migration services, please check out the articles and infographics on our website.