Proper planning eliminates most of the risks associated with cloud migrations.
That was the main theme at the Transform Your Data Centre Executive Forum held in Johannesburg last week. The event was hosted by Vision Solutions and Microsoft, in partnership with ITWeb.
Sanford Edinberry, data centre technology solutions professional at Microsoft SA, says organisations are aware that cloud migration or change to the status quo is a daunting decision to make.
He points out organisations fear losing data, affecting system performance, or negatively impacting on user experience through the cloud migration process.
"Proper planning will do away with most, if not all, risks and challenges when embarking on a migration project," says Edinberry.
He urges organisations to engage with a partner who has the skill set and experience to assist if they have not embarked on a migration project before. "Select a proven and well-supported technology to automate the cloud migration process -one that caters for a fall-back mechanism in case unforeseen issues arise."
According to Edinberry, migrations to the cloud are being fuelled globally by businesses under strain, needing to increase efficiency and profitability in an affordable manner.
"Organisations also need to focus on their business and not running an IT support centre. Once businesses begin to realise what is possible when they move the right workloads to the cloud, a whole new way of business unfolds."
Also speaking at the event, Shahbaz Wadiwala, solution architect at Vision Solutions, noted there are technology solutions that are designed to provide high availability that can help organisations eliminate downtime during cloud migrations, while also helping them avoid many of the sources of migration failures.
These solutions allow users to be online during the entire synchronisation process, Wadiwala concluded.
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