We are sure that few of our last posts must have intrigued a lot off businesses to transfer to cloud; after all, cloud brings many matchless advantages to the businesses out of which cost efficiency is the key one. However, every cloud transfer is not a hit. Before shifting to cloud, there are some crucial factors to consider, to make sure that your cloud migration proves to be successful.
Onsite IT infrastructures and remote data centers are traditionally relied for the storing digital information that includes videos, documents, emails, and other formats. However, the current surge in data production because of increasing use of internet connected devices and ever-expanding internet users base, has forced businesses to move their digital assets to cloud.
Cost efficiency is another key reason for shifting to cloud-based storage solutions and discontinuing the on-site storage platforms. Affordability, scalability, availability, and flexibility are the most striking advantages of cloud-based storage solutions.
1. Cloud Service Provider’s Certifications
Your cloud hosting service provider must comply with all the relevant federal guidelines in terms of requirements of compliance and security of the industry. This is applicable to all industry verticals where the personal information, data or passwords of the customers are handled. The vendor must be having established ways to follow the guidelines of regulations without an iota of deviation.
You should also know regulations are updated from time to time by governments and thus, the cloud vendors must keep themselves up-to-date by upholding strict compliance with these regulations.
2. Capabilities of Data Transfer
Bandwidth limitation is a crucial factor to understand the ability of transferring data in terms of transfer and back up of huge data volumes. Bandwidth limitations do affect the data transfer operations. These limits must be understood with respect to locations and the volume of data that is to be transferred. Since cloud storage entails data migration from onsite environment of business to outside environment, encompassing wide area networks, the overall data transfer cost can be expressively higher.
Consideration of the entire potential of bandwidth as well as costs for data transfer in a given time is highly important while selecting the cloud storage service provider.
3. Status of data encryption
Encryption is tremendously important before you start to move critical data to the cloud environment. Even though, numerous storage service providers provide data encryption as part of the storage services, it is recommended that customers should also encrypt data at their end for additional security. Furthermore, you should also plan a contingency plan to reinstate your data in the case when the cloud storage provider is closing the business or to help you securely move all your digital assets to another vendor. Every time you transfer the data away from your onsite infrastructure, it needs to be encrypted for definite protection from unofficial intrusion.
From the point of operations side, the teams would be required to control which workloads and apps can be migrated as is, which must be re-architected, and when to retire or replace the costly features or applications
