How to Maintain Your Performance During Cloud Migration

As we’ve learned from recent events, any online entity, big or small, is subject to fail. Today’s IT landscape is so complex, most digital businesses rely on other services to ensure their service is running properly and efficiently. For many businesses, the cloud has become the answer to that problem. Cloud services allow us to save a substantial amount of time and money by speeding up content delivery and ensuring happy end users; however, simply deploying these cloud services doesn’t completely eliminate your risk for failure. Just because you outsource your digital delivery services to cloud providers, does not mean you are in the clear when it comes to performance problems. In fact, the more providers you rely on, the more planning is needed to ensure your end-user experience meets expectations.

The first step to ensuring optimal performance as you migrate your services to the cloud is choosing the right providers for your company. During your selection process, make sure the provider you’re evaluating has technical expertise and truly understands your business. CIO.com says the cloud service provider must be proficient with both its technology and understanding of your business in order to achieve your needs. Selecting a provider that will adhere to a mutually agreed upon service-level agreement (SLA) is crucial as well. SLAs allow you ensure that the provider will meet the service you expect, or you stand to receive compensation in the case that those levels are not met.

Once you have selected your provider, pre- and post-migration planning are key to avoiding performance degradation throughout the process. Deploying a performance monitoring platform will allow you to benchmark your performance throughout every stage of the migration process. This visibility will enable you to understand your performance prior to migrating so you will be able to identify if and when your performance is affected as the migration begins.

After migration, creating redundancy plans for your most critical components is the only way to ensure minimal impact if one of those providers goes down. While this certainly isn’t an inexpensive protection plan, having a backup plan for DNS, CDN, and other critical providers can prevent experiencing significant downtime when one of those providers has an outage.

When it comes to cloud migration planning, this is just the tip of the iceberg. Avnet CIO Steve Phillips will be moderating a panelist discussion on cloud challenges at Catchpoint Elevate coming up on April 10-13. During this discussion, expert panelists will cover all of the various challenges companies face when migrating their services to the cloud, from the actual implementation to monitoring the performance of your cloud services after deployment.

To attend this panel discussion, as well as several other panel discussions and learning tracks, register for Catchpoint Elevate here.