Practical Cloud Knowledge: Install, Configure, and Manage - Deploying and Managing a Cloud Infrastructure - page 205

said in past tense because, up until this point, you should already have a good idea about the
cloud, its surrounding technologies, and the benefits it will bring to your organization. No
one moves to the cloud because the other guys are doing it; it is done because of the benefits.
Let us then explore a bit on the requirements for a smooth migration of services and data.
To establish business requirements, you must hold stakeholder meetings if you have not
already. Have your stakeholders list what they want and what they do not want during the
migration phase. The business stakeholders will probably list near-impossible things like
zero downtime or no disruption, but that is the purpose of the meetings, so that the business
folks and the technical folks will see eye to eye regarding what is wanted and what is pos-
sible, easy, or ideal. Of course, everyone wants zero disruption, which is not entirely impos-
sible, but it will take a lot to accomplish—in short, a lot of planning and effort.
Data and application migration used to be purely technical issues that the IT department
had to handle, but that is no longer the case with the advent of the pay-as-you-go cloud
computing model. No longer is the migration process in the hands of the organization's IT
department; it's now in the hands of your third-party service provider. The beauty of this
is that the service provider has already made a business out of migration and they already
have set guidelines and best practices that you can apply based on your own migration
requirements. The least you would need to do now is have the business and IT managers
be present along with some engineers in order to smooth out the migration details with
the provider.
Even with that already taken care of, you still need to establish your requirements so
that the provider has something to work with and then tailor their migration solution to
your specific needs and requirements. The answers to the following questions might be
enough information for the provider, but the more detailed information you can provide,
the better.
■ Why are we migrating data and applications in the first place? The answer to this is
straightforward because this is the driving force for “cloudifying” your processes anyway.
■■ Which data needs to be migrated, and which data needs to stay in-house? This has a
lot to do with the control and security of your data. The best people to answer these
questions are your business and technical managers.
■ When should the migration take place? The best time is often on a weekend or at night
when very few people are working. But this entirely depends on the type of organization
because some are global and because of time differences, the current system may not be
in use in one place but very active in another. Also, some systems such as online retail
and some services have to be accessible for 24 hours and seven days a week, so a migra-
tion will be tricky and downtime will be inevitable.
When migration is completed, the old system can be decommissioned and all operations
transferred to the new system in a way that minimizes or totally removes downtime. And
once all business operations are on the new cloud system, you can focus your efforts in
keeping things running through constant maintenance and process improvement.