You have decided to migrate your infrastructures and data to the Cloud, congratulations!
Now comes the hardest part: putting together a migration team.
Migrating to the Cloud is an unavoidable process for every company: to gain in efficiency, optimise your IT costs, improve your business performance…
But migrating is not an easy thing. It calls for organisation, planning and preparation.
To succeed, you must:
- put together a team responsible for this project,
- not skip any step.
- How do you put together a team for your migration to the Cloud?
- Why put together a team for your Cloud migration?
How do you put together a team for your migration to the Cloud?
A successful Cloud transformation starts with the selection of a team of experts with the necessary know-how, in-house or externally if you do not have the resources required. In that case, call on Cloud service providers such as Premaccess.
Here are the talents you will need to find in this team:
They will be the person accountable for this migration. Depending on the size of the company or the scale of the project, this may be the CEO, the COO, the CTO, the CFO.
Buy-in from senior management is essential to the success of the migration strategy towards the Cloud.
The particularity of the Cloud is that it can have an impact on practically every aspect of the company: IT, human resources, finance, marketing, sales, product development, legal, customer support, and so on.
Many stakeholders are likely to be affected by a migration to the Cloud, and it could have an impact on the organisation in the years to come. For the migration to succeed, every level of the company must be involved!
A Solution Architect (with Cloud Provider certification is a plus)
Just as a building – or an internal IT infrastructure – needs an architect, the same goes for a cloud strategy.
A cloud architect designs the Cloud environment. This expert must have a good knowledge of the organisation’s IT and business objectives and challenges, because they have to keep the architecture aligned with those objectives and take the challenges into account.
The solution architect must necessarily work closely with the other members of the technical team to make sure that the design meets the requirements of the company’s various business stakeholders. The more complex the Cloud environment, the more vital this role becomes.
They are the guarantor of the methods and procedures to be put in place for this migration to succeed. In the case of building a house, an architect checks the solidity of the foundations. A Solution Architect proceeds in the same way on the Cloud. They secure the infrastructures to avoid the migration having an impact on production.
A system administrator or SysOps
Infrastructure as a service (IaaS) radically changes the role of the system administrator. Rather than managing the hardware, the configuration and the settings of the applications, this person will make sure that you have the Cloud resources you need.
Cloud system administrators therefore focus on managing and customising Cloud resources to match the organisation’s needs as closely as possible.
While Cloud architects design the overall framework of the Cloud environment, administrators handle the day-to-day tasks needed to keep the services running.
Cloud administrators must have a solid understanding of virtual machines and cloud networking, as well as experience of IaaS and platform as a service (PaaS) offerings. Once again, do not forget to train your teams, almost whatever their level in the hierarchy; you can raise their awareness at every level.
A Cloud Security Manager or new-generation CISO!
Every company launching a Cloud strategy knows — or should know — how important it is to make sure that data and applications are protected against attacks.
The role of the Cloud security manager is to determine what the organisation has to do in terms of security and to make sure that all the necessary tools and services are deployed and maintained. This person is responsible for setting up and managing access controls to Cloud resources, such as applications, development, storage and the network (VPN, direct connection, etc…).
It is important to steer all the security aspects first, during the migration, and then once your infrastructures are on the Cloud. It is therefore preferable to involve these security profiles from the very start of the migration project.
Cloud security managers must have a thorough understanding of Cloud cybersecurity risks, including the latest threats. Given the importance of this role, this person will probably work with all the other members of the Cloud team in place for the migration. Close collaboration with senior security executives is also important.
They will work closely with the Cloud Security Manager and will be tasked with making sure that your organisation complies with the confidentiality or legal compliance requirements to which your organisation may be subject..
Why put together a team for your Cloud migration?
Putting together a team that fits and that evolves with your migration project will allow you to get through the stages that are essential to making this project a success. It will help you take the right decisions at each stage of the process, minimise the risks and ensure that your company can see its transformation journey through.
Among the essential stages, we find:
Planning your migration to the Cloud
You should not jump blindly into the Cloud.
For such a project, this team will help you draw up a migration plan.
The strategy must set out your procedures and the key points of the migration step by step, Having such a plan:
- gives your company a direction to move forward,
- helps minimise the risks throughout your journey towards digital transformation.
On the basis of the deliverables of the design phase and the agreed migration methods, detailed schedules are drawn up for the migrations. This migration planning includes the detail of the migration activities and the resource allocations (technical and human).
Involving your staff in the project
Your project will succeed if you have involved your whole team in this major structuring project. A communication plan must therefore be put in place to keep your staff informed as the project progresses.
Estimating the cost of the migration to the cloud
Before migrating your data to the cloud, you will need to estimate the costs (storage of resources, and so on).
Having a cloud migration team helps you protect your users’ data.
Reliability and efficiency
A cloud migration team helps you mitigate or even eliminate the costly mistakes that an inexperienced in-house team might make. Those mistakes include deployment or compliance problems, cybersecurity attacks… which can lead to losses.
Conclusion
Putting together a Cloud migration team can be both a challenge and an opportunity. The Premaccess team, an expert in Cloud migration, is here to help you:by giving you access to Cloud architects, engineers, system administrators, security managers, and so on.by taking you through each of the stages successfully.
We offer a suite of services designed to help you move into the Cloud. From migration to ongoing management and maintenance, we are here to make this move to the Cloud easier for you and to save you time.
Contact us