The cloud is growing to be a very compelling approach for organizations to host ECM applications, offering reliable computing power, flexible cost models, and lots of off-premise support assembled conveniently in an enterprise content management service agreement. Undoubtedly, this represents unexplored territory for many organization since these critical applications are requiring more maintenance and care than standard deployments.

Organizations must migrate their ECM systems with a well-defined game plan and manage them during their life cycles to be sure that these investments keep and expand their value in new environments. With a robust cloud migration strategy, organizations will undoubtedly be able to apprehend the benefits of these next-generation technologies.

Before migrating your ECM system to cloud, you should consider the following things:

1. What assets you are moving and their specific requirements.

2. How much support you will get from the cloud partner.

3. Your ROI objectives

 

The individual requirements and challenges of your organization should be the only thing forming your cloud migration strategy. As a one-size-fits-all financial model or marketing plan isn’t working for every organization, the same applies when it comes to implementing a successful cloud migration strategy.

Additionally, you should answer the following questions:

1. Will you reduce costs?

2. Is it simpler?

3. Is it more secure?

All of these questions bring to THE question: Will the cloud migration be powerful enough to outrun the hassle your organization is dealing with? Well, the answers vary. But, to find the right answer regarding your organization, you will need a robust strategy for migrating your ECM to the cloud.

Setting Your Strategy

Every organization should start planning the cloud migration by outlining clear definition of their goals, priorities, and ranking. The cloud migration has a huge list of benefits. It can be an excellent opportunity to reduce capital expenses and free up your team to work on other significant projects; it will provide your organization with better performance and stronger security. Knowing the most important statistics for your organization will help you implement a cloud migration plan that emphasizes the outcomes.

Set up your cloud migration strategy by answering these questions:

1. Why are you migrating?

2. What are your goals?

3. How will you measure achievement?

Answering these questions and addressing any concerns about them before starting the migration will save you from countless headaches and obstacles as you proceed forward.

Defining Your Migration Roadmap

The cloud migration plan should be simple. When the project has clear milestones and everyone is following the same methodology, you won’t get mired in arguments over which is the correct path. To ensure that everything is going right, follow these steps:

1. Select a good project leader. To keep things moving on the desired flow, you should assign a project leader, preferably an impartial person that has the authority to demand performance and can make every team member be on the same page.

2. Create a workbook. Outline the methods and tools and get a copy for everyone involved in the project, so they all have clear instructions for the organization’s goals.

3. Schedule meetings. Whether they will be in person or they will take the form of emails or calls, setting up a systematic way to keep all team members informed is crucial for further success.

Defining Your Needs

Start your migration by understanding the basics – what data will you migrate to the cloud. Even if it sounds simple, organizations often skip this step and then discover more applications that need to be moved. An infrastructure evaluation will help you figure out what needs to go where and you will start to get a sense of what your migration should look like.

A solid evaluation will explain the following concerns:

• What are you migrating?
• What are the RTO (Recovery Time Objective) and RPO (Recovery Point Objective) of every application?
• Where are all the data and apps placed and how can you easily find them?
• How much capacity your applications and data are utilizing?
• What are the security and compliance requirements of every application?
• How is everything associated with your system?

Before starting the migration process it is good to identify what needs to be migrated and how much capacity it requires.

Testing

To realize cloud migration benefits, you need to be sure you are not bringing in any new vulnerabilities. To ensure this isn’t the case it is crucial to test cloud migrations before implementing a full-scale project. Testing will help you to easily spot formerly unknown potential issues.

Even if it might sound silly, attempting equipment cool down is really important since some hardware component may not come back from a cooldown or not work properly. It is simpler to solve some issue if you know what won’t recover when migrated to the cloud.

Cooling down the applications and declaring a maintenance window will give your organization an opportunity to realize how fast the applications will be brought back online after migrating. Having real data to work with, you can include the actual times into your plan and minimize the unexpected.

An ideal approach to test migration is to move the DR environment to the cloud. This will give you a much precise sense of how migration plan is and where you can come across pitfalls. Any bugs you find can be worked out and included in the migration plan, additionally diminishing the risk. It likewise allows you to virtualize the reinforcement condition with a specific end goal to coordinate the migrated condition.

Wrap Up

The basic reason for implementing an enterprise content management system is to enhance the accessibility of corporate data. Moving your ECM system to cloud indicates that now data is more accessible than ever.

It is very important to start your cloud migration with an understanding of the benefits of cloud computing your organization needs the most. Whether it is reducing costs, or keeping up with the new-gen technologies, having a robust cloud migration strategy will maximize the advantages.