Cloud Storage Migration Strategies to Ensure Business Continuity

Whenever your business plans for a significant change, like migrating data to a new cloud storage platform, you must plan it in such a way it does not disrupt business continuity. Take specialized measures to protect your organizational data even during unprecedented disasters and make your company resilient, bouncing back from any failure.

Delve into this article to unlock insights about the key cloud storage migration strategies for maintaining business continuity and avoiding end-user disruption.

1. Analyze the Migration Scope and Dependencies

Before kickstarting your cloud data migration, understand the current source landscape to identify the data and dependencies to them. It is crucial to preserve the same data dependencies at the destination through sharing permissions preservation for a smooth flow of tasks without any issues.

Once you conduct a source data audit, you get more insights into planning the scope of work for the migration project. An SOW enables the IT team to inform business users if any of their routine tasks will be affected or not and how long it will take to resume regular activities.

By incorporating a well-planned cloud storage migration strategy, you can minimize disruptions to end users.

2. Prioritize the Order of Data Migration

Your IT team must sort the source data, prioritize the order of migration based on the direct business impact, and strategize your move according to your organizational needs. Migration experts recommend testing out the waters with demo user accounts.

Once you successfully complete executing it, you can move on to migrate more critical data. Ultimately, your choice of migration order must depend on preserving business continuity in the organization without hurdles to any ongoing or future operations.

3. Have Transparent Communication With Stakeholders

Once you get stakeholder buy-in for the cloud storage migration, discuss with them the potential impacts so that they are well-informed about the consequences and benefits. No change must come as a surprise to them, which can later create resistance to adopting the new cloud.

Conduct dedicated hands-on training to make end-users well accustomed to the new interface and features that can influence better productivity and business continuity.

4. Choose the Type of Migration

Determine the migration type that aligns with providing business continuity for the entire organization. For example, opt for a phased migration to move a batch of data of a particular business unit rather than moving all at once. Transferring data batches one after the other can eliminate risks of network overburdening and also allow you to validate the results before moving the rest.

Your IT team can inform each department about their scheduled data transfer so that they can prepare much in advance to handle their business operations accordingly.

5. Have a Data Backup & Resilient Rollback Strategy

Backup all the data in its original format before the migration to help recover it in case of any unforeseen disasters. As much as being innovative, it is equally critical to focus and prepare to be resilient to combat anything that comes in the way of continuing your business operations.

Devise rollback strategies that can guide your migration team to revert to the latest endpoint in the migration and save a lot of time, effort, and cost in rectifying the data loss.

6. Select a Capable Migration Tool

Partner with a specialized and reliable migration service provider who offers a tailored migration solution that is just the right fit for your company’s needs. Assess the migration tool’s features through a pilot run and verify if it matches your requirements.

Some of the essential migration tool features that help preserve business continuity during cloud migration are:

• Pre-migration assessment
• File Features migration (comments, metadata, timestamps, permissions)
• Incremental migration (to transfer the latest changes at source storage)
• Phased migration
• Links migration
• Email attribute migration (email attachments, contacts, tasks, distribution lists, etc.)
• Messages migration

7. Conduct Live Monitoring

Real-time migration monitoring can enable you to identify and address any discrepancies as soon as possible. Based on the live results, it can help your migration team pause or continue the data transfer.

8. Post-Migration Validation

Conduct an exhaustive post-migration validation to ensure everything migrated is in line with the expected results. If there is any mismatch in the outcomes, act fast to make the necessary changes so that it does not affect the business continuity.

Business continuity planning cannot be a separate entity but an integral part of the cloud storage migration strategy. At CloudFuze, the migration experts assist you in devising a solid cloud migration strategy that is unique and customized for your company. CloudFuze’s managed migration solutions and robust migration tool features aim to deliver seamless data transfer while maintaining business continuity.

You can schedule a consultation with CloudFuze’s migration team to discuss more.