Before you take the step of moving to the cloud, you should define what you want to achieve by it. Start by mapping out your IT infrastructure. That way, you can easily assign workloads to your equipment and applications. Once you have this insight, you can set your key performance indicators (KPIs). Use these to identify your problems during migration and determine when the migration is complete.

Not every application belongs in the cloud. It’s important for companies to be aware of the impact of migrating specific workloads and applications to the cloud – before they actually launch the migration process.

In assessing which applications to migrate, you need to consider these questions:

• What applications can make the transition as they are and what applications will require a redesign?
• If a redesign is needed, what's the level of complexity?
• Does the cloud provider have services that allow migration without having to reconfigure the workloads?
• What’s the return on investment for each migrated application, and how long will it be before we earn it?

An analysis of your architecture and a careful examination of your applications will help you to decide where migration makes logical sense.

Once you’ve evaluated those applications and services for which migration makes sense, work out how you want to transfer each item to the cloud. Also consider how you can handle data integrity and operational continuity while you do it. And also investigate what dependencies exist, so that you can decide on the sequence of applications to be migrated.

An important part of your data migration lies in choosing a cloud provider who will support you during and after the migration process. Here are some questions to ask when evaluating providers:

• What tools are available to facilitate the process?
• Can the provider support public, private and multicloud environments on every scale?
• How can the provider help you to deal with complex interdependencies, non-flexible architectures or redundant and obsolete technology?
• What support level can the provider offer during the migration process?

Making the transition to the cloud isn't a job for one man. You should therefore look for a service provider with proven experience in managing the complex tasks that are needed to for cloud migration on a global scale. That includes the provision of progress-based service agreements.

If you’ve followed the first four steps meticulously, this last step should be relatively simple. How you migrate to the cloud depends partly on the complexity and architecture of your applications and data. On the one hand, you can transfer the entire application, carry out a test to see whether it works and then switch over your traffic. On the other, you can select a more fragmented approach, migrate and validate customers gradually and then continue until all customers have been moved across to the cloud.

By following a checklist for cloud migration, you can make sure you’re prepared for possible problems and can guarantee a flawless journey. That way, you can ultimately benefit from the advantages of working with the cloud.