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Yay! It's time to migrate to the cloud.
Following meticulous planning and risk assessment, migration day (or week) finally arrives.
Each earlier stage of the process has been working toward this day: thinking about the platform that your cloud computing solution will operate on; the comprehensive assessment; the painstaking design; the careful consideration that goes into each individual component and service that will move to the cloud.
The entire process is geared toward ensuring implementation is carried out with as much ease and as little interruption to business as possible.
Downtime isn't always inevitable, although it is certainly a challenge to avoid any outage to service when migrating to the cloud.
Our approach is to minimise the impact as much as feasibly possible, although there is a greater focus on ensuring migration works right first time and results in zero data loss or compromise, as these goals tend to be of greater importance to clients.
During the assessment and design stages of the ‘moving to the cloud’ work-flow, we will often have identified multiple business solutions that we recommend could or should be moved to the cloud in order to realise real, concrete business benefits.
It would be foolish to try to move each component to the cloud at once: from not only a logistics perspective but also a risk management standpoint. Slow and steady wins the race.
Instead, cloud migration usually entails:
Email is possibly the most common service we will move to the cloud for our clients on migration day.
Office 365 offers dramatic scalability and cost benefits to many businesses still using traditional on-site email servers, meaning we’ve become past masters at migrating to Microsoft’s flagship cloud email service (in addition to other cloud email providers), from a range of legacy mail solutions.
Our method for migrating email to the cloud might differ in small ways from client to client but fundamentally, the high-level process we follow is along the following lines:
The migration process for moving email delivery to a cloud solution is actually remarkably similar to how a change to a traditional mail delivery route might have been handled, 100 years ago or more.
Consider a new railway track, built to facilitate a new post house for receiving mail.
While the railway line and post-house itself is under construction, mail continues to be delivered via the existing rail infrastructure. Once the new post-house is open for business (receiving mail), the new railway siding is opened up for delivery by rail.
However, not all the train drivers have been debriefed, and some continue to use the old route, in the short-term.
Any mail delivered to the old post-house needs to be ported manually over to the new post-house, for a short while, to ensure delivery is not impacted. After a week, it becomes clear that mail is no longer arriving at the old location, so the old post-house no longer needs to be staffed, and can close down.
Following each stage of a client’s migration to the cloud, stringent acceptance testing is carried out to assess the expected functionality is fully serviceable.
Our migration consultants then remain on-site to ensure that your workforce is given comprehensive user training in how to use any new or replacement software that has been introduced.
Similarly, staff are made aware of any required changes to their workflow that might be necessary due to version updates or differences in how a particular program operates following migration to the cloud.
1-to-1 training sessions can be provided for specialist personnel and employees with learning difficulties, to aid the transition.
We recognise that technology improvements are useless if you feel lost or out of your depth using the tools at your disposal, and are happy to take the time to thoroughly train users and answer any questions they may have.
