Best Practices for Moving to the Cloud without Losing Productivity

Transitioning your office to new technologies with best practices can offer big payoffs. The process, however, can sometimes be a rocky one and moving your organization to the Cloud is no exception.

Many companies decide that Cloud Computing is not only cheaper than running and maintaining onsite servers, but it allows employees to easily share files and collaborate on projects regardless of location. The learning curve of adopting the cloud can be a steep one. To prevent user friction and sustain a high level of performance (including access and security throughout the transition period), the best migration approach is one that is slow and carefully considered.

To make your organization’s migration to the Cloud as seamless as possible, best practices to follow include:

When Choosing a Provider, Focus on Reliability

When you’re thinking about requirements for selecting a Cloud provider, make sure to pay close attention to reliability. If your company anticipates moving mission-critical workloads to the Cloud, you’ll want to ensure that you won’t have to worry about outages or downtime. Otherwise, your company’s productivity will be at stake and users will become quickly frustrated.

Reliability is one of the key qualities that enterprises seek in a Cloud provider; in fact, 68% of companies cite it as a top reason for selecting their provider. When making your decision, you don’t want to rely solely on a provider’s self-reported downtime hours, because not all companies measure downtime the same way. Instead, make sure that you speak to a representative to understand how they make their calculations, and what compensation they offer for any lost productivity.

Ensuring that your Cloud provider is dependable offers the best way to avoid employee (and client) frustrations. Otherwise, you risk making your organization less productive.

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Consider a Hybrid Cloud Option Where You Also Keep and Maintain Some Onsite Servers

If you’re concerned about productivity, you may want to consider a provider that offers a Hybrid Cloud option. In this scenario, your company can take full advantage of the flexibility that the public cloud has to offer while also maintaining some or even all of your on-site servers to function as an on-site private Cloud.

This mix allows you to keep a backup of data onsite so that you can still work during any downtime and to route around the worst-case scenario of losing any cloud data. It also allows employees to attain the benefits of working in the Cloud while mitigating some common Cloud-related concerns about data ownership and privacy.

By eliminating the most common objections to sharing or storing certain documents in a public Cloud environment, a hybrid cloud option offers enterprises a way to fully embrace the Cloud and maximize the productivity that a diverse Cloud environment can offer.

Don’t Make the Move All at Once

You would never make a physical move all at once if your company was moving offices. In a similar fashion, you should never make a virtual move all at once, either.

Before you begin to migrate data, decide on a plan of action based on your immediate needs. If your company is urgently running out of space on your servers, for example, you may want to automatically save new files to cloud storage but migrate your existing files away from your servers on your own timeline.

In addition to devising a strategy for what data to move first, you should consider devising a strategy for which employees should begin to use Cloud services first. Perhaps there are more tech-savvy teams of employees, or groups of employees that have a more urgent need for remote collaboration. You can begin the migration process by allowing these groups to be the first to try out the new process. Then, you also garner the benefits of hearing their reports regarding any issues or concerns, which can then be addressed before deploying changes across the entire company.

No matter how your company goes about its implementation strategy, simply having a day-to-day plan of action can keep your company on schedule while controlling the pace of change.

Power through the Challenges

Learning a new way of doing things is never easy, but with the tips above your company can deliver a positive user experience while implementing change. Remain confident that if you power through any migration challenges, you’ll come out more productive and efficient on the other side. Once you’ve experienced the convenience of cloud computing, you’ll never want to go back.

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