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In Part I of our series, we did list some tips to follow before transferring data to the cloud. Below, in Part II, we will further discuss additional points:

5 – Move First and then Renovate

It is critical to test the migration first and then make a thorough plan. Cloud users are capable of controlling the economies of scale of the cloud, reduce capital spending and save time through selecting cloud just like an application design centre, instead of re-architecting the existing applications and to make it suitable for the cloud. Therefore, it is recommended to refine and improve cloud applications after developing the necessary basic constituents of the cloud.

6 – Crunch the Numbers to Understand Costs

The primary reason to transfer data to the cloud is to save money. It is quite simple to get costs of infrastructure by calculating the used money on vendor support, servers and licenses. However, it is challenging to get an estimate of time spent by the most expensive members of the team. How much time does it take to carry on the legacy systems, solving problems, deleting HR records manually, double entering payroll information, troubleshooting and fixing the application errors on various desktops, and restoring data from backups? If a company has a clear sense of all these types of associated costs, then it is possible to make an assessment of SaaS and hosted solutions; and as a result, the path to the cloud will be very clear.

7 – Security Should be Considered

Security is a huge concern while considering a move to the cloud. In order to stay compliant, you need to look into industry standards. Use third-party sources, such as the Cloud Security Alliance Consensus Assessments Initiative Questionnaire [1] to guide you through the process of understanding potential security pitfalls.

In addition, you need to select cloud storage services that are certified by standards, such as FIPS-140. These solutions offer multiple layers of security and are impossible to hack. Choose a service provider that is well known and respected in the industry, that enforces audit policies on apps and all data stored in its cloud.

8 – Secure your Management Console

The cloud computing console is the life-line of your entire data centre. This means, the management console must always be protected at all times, or else it could be hacked for ransom, as in the case of Code Spaces, which was forced to close after the hackers deleted all of its data when the ransom was not paid.

Obviously your manual processes and offline processes will not work just as efficiently in the cloud. There are both technological and configuration issues that need to be addressed when your data moves from local data repositories to remote servers and is accessed by many more people from many more locations. Your processes will have to be re-engineered with intelligence and understanding of the factors involved in the transformation that is brought by cloud computing. Cloud service vendors understand this and tailor their systems to take the right inputs from their customers and create the right delivery mechanisms, so that cloud based issues do not degrade user experience of the network.

The first step in the direction of cloud migration lies in your understanding your business process. Obviously, you are expected to know the process you use. So, you need to drill down to individual processes and understand the logic of it all, before you migrate it to the cloud. The exercise will make each individual process more visible to you, and will help you understand how it contributes to the entire value chain. Once you have the grasp of the process logic for every process, it is a simple matter of modelling the entire business value chain by linking together the different contributing processes without losing sight of the measurement of systems and activities within each process. The monitoring mechanism that is built in parallel will give you a clear view of the process chain and its functioning from start to finish. Migrating all this to the cloud keeping an eye on latency and configuration issues will be simplified by cloud vendors using GUIs (graphical user interfaces) that are user friendly and interactive.

Cloud services distinguish their services from other similar offerings in the niche by extending expert help to their customers in specific directions. A few cloud services use Wizards and agent user interfaces to guide their users through the process of setting up their applications and analytical systems or customising their cloud. They allow business rules to be integrated into the process logic even before the data is fed into the storage repository. The database is then automatically organised (in accordance with business logic and rules) and decision-making is simplified, automated by policies translated and integrated into the systems as rules. The system then guides human activities and initiates corrective actions for exceptions that may occur when users access data and attempt to manipulate it for business uses. You can certainly use these services to your advantage while migrating to the cloud!

Other cloud services that you can use in your re-engineering efforts are: archival services, de-duplication and compression services, and disaster recovery services.