Moving to the cloud tends to be a daunting process for most companies. The majority of cloud providers want your business, the whole industry has matured, and the process ends up being easy once you know how to break it down and what to look for. Things are easier than they used to be, but it really doesn’t feel that way if you don’t know what to look for.
In order to make a move to the cloud successful, you need to know that discovery determines success, you need to set the tone for the move, and you need to coordinate your efforts for the move (including testing). You need to know what you’re looking for, how to implement it, and how to make the whole process transparent. You want your clients or company to see the whole process as completely transparent.
Discovery Determines Success
The discovery process is the fundamental basis of any project. If you don’t know where you’re starting and what you’re working with, how do you do anything at all? You can’t build a deck without wood, and you can’t plan a project without details.
Where you’re starting determines how you get to the next step. Exchange 2007 and Exchange 2010 are substantially different for a cloud migration. One is trivial, the other is agonizing. How much bandwidth is available at the site and how much data needs to be moved? What hardware exists on site?
What access does the client have and can you get the access you need? A lot of clients let their IT department or company manage to the point of absurdity. No one outside of who has a vested interest in stopping the migration knows the credentials. You can’t move forward without access.
The discovery process determines whether the project is even possible or practical, what the scope should be, and whether or not the project can go smoothly. There are points you can get through without full access, but they may be painful. What’s the budget? It might be worth it during a hostile takeover, but why bother if you don’t need to?
Set the Tone During the Move
You set the tone at the start of the migration. Make it easy on your client or company even if it makes it hard for you. Your inconvenience means that your client has a smooth experience which is going to be their first impression of the cloud solution you sold them.
Making it easy means that a minor inconvenience becomes something to live with rather than a hill to die on. The shortcut requiring an extra click is a little hiccup with a good move, and a nightmare and catalyst for anger during a bad one. Make it so there’s nothing substantial for your users to notice.
If discovery goes well, you can spend time making sure everything works. If discovery doesn’t go well, you should help the client brace themselves for the move. Set the tone for the users in both expectation and implementation. The move from Citrix to Azure is going to be painful no matter how much work you put it into, make sure that the client is aware and why.
Coordinating the Move
You shouldn’t migrate your accounting client to a new cloud platform the first quarter, especially near April. You shouldn’t move a school at the start of a semester. What does your client do and when do they do it? Coordinate the move with your client so you work during their downtime to get them moved over. This makes the move easier for both parties, and allows more flexibility.
Part of coordinating the move is also testing the cutover. Is there a small group which can test the solution and make sure things function as expected? Doing this helps reduce the headache of the move and makes sure things work when the real cutover happens. Some products may be all or nothing, but they usually have tests to gauge whether things should work or not.
A gradual move is going to work better for everyone, but often costs more and is a harder sell to clients. If the client has deep pockets and cares most about efficiency, then sell them on a gradual move to make sure everything works and works well. Make sure the client is trained and can gradually train new teams as they move over.
Other Considerations
Has the client been trained on the new system? What changes are coming to their beloved systems? I’ve had to support Office XP when Office 2016 first released due to a client just refusing to move. What legacy systems are going to be impacted from a human side? Discovery will tell us that we have an Office XP license, but will the user be malleable enough to move? The human element is going to affect the migration as much as any technical concern.
Are there any technical resources on site? If so, what access will they need to help support the cloud instance? There are times you want someone to have privileged access to the firewall, VPN server, etc. in order to make sure the client can respond when IT can’t. Is there a resource which can be trusted with this level of access without completely compromising everything? Sometimes that resource just plain doesn’t exist at a site.
Actually Moving to the Cloud
You’re going to find many other situational incidents when you actually start to migrate to the cloud. This document gives you a good starting point to begin picking at the right problems. Your discovery process sets the baseline for the project. You also need to set the tone for the migration with the client and make sure everything which can be accounted for is. You then need to coordinate the actual migration with the client and their available resources.
Like any plan, it’s going to fall apart in some way from something unexpected, but the more you know in advance, the less likely it is for everything to go awry. Once you know what you’re working with from a technical standpoint, how will the client handle the change? How will they handle something going wrong? Are we moving due to everything going sideways or are we moving as a proactive measure?
The more you scaffold the project, the more you can control these other concerns. You’re going to have to adapt or change something somewhere, but make it something minor where possible. Take the human element into consideration where possible as well as it impacts the other parts of the process.
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