25 questions you should ask before engaging with a cloud migration service provider
Time and again you’ve read about the benefits of migrating to the Cloud and the Senior Executives are seriously contemplating about it. If you’re a technology leader, you’re obviously concerned about your growth and bottom line. You always wish to keep new deployments under budget and ensure that the issues have been addressed.
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It’s the same dilemma before migrating your data and applications in the Cloud. One of the biggest disadvantages, across all industries, is that there is an upfront software price and it’s nearly impossible to attain the Total Cost of Ownership (hardware, support, etc.). This is where cloud comes to rescue. The cloud services operate on a subscription model, wherein the cost is based on your usage. It helps you have control on your IT spend. Security, enhanced control, integration with everything, and reliability are just some of the benefits that you realize along your cloud journey. Obviously, it can save you superfluous IT infrastructure costs.
Cloud Migration is a technical and planned process the requires you to select an experienced, knowledgeable and a vendor who has both technical and non-technical staff to manage your migration needs. The cloud migration service provider must ensure that you have zero downtime, maximum working hours, parallel cloud environment so that users can test before they go live, and perform a thorough due diligence so that you feel confident about their services.
Before you engage with a cloud service provider, you must evaluate and gauge the provider to ensure you get maximum ROI.
1. What are your business objectives with a cloud adoption?
2. How will the business objectives help to further the company vision?
3. What are the available resources to support a cloud migration?
4. What are the cloud service providers SLAs that best meet your organization needs?
5. Determine if the cloud infrastructure or any of its components is single tenant or fully multi-tenant architecture?
6. Ask about their available network segmentation
7. What are the functions that you’d like to automate?
8. Can the cloud service provider use APIs to move applications that are written for a specific orchestration platform or something that vendor-specific?
9. What is the Business Continuity (BC) and Disaster Recovery (DR) provision?
10. What are the DR locations and the security measures available at these locations?
11. Does the provider offer managed recovery, automated or manual?
12. Will the cloud service provider allow you the flexibility to add controls of your own?
13. Who will keep the rights to order additional services?
14. What is the risk management plan of the cloud service provider?
15. What is the governance structure that the cloud service provider suggests?
16. What are the compliance requirements that the cloud service provider meets?
17. Can the service provider perform a cloud readiness assessment for you?
18. What are the technical requirements and interdependencies of your applications?
19. Who will be responsible for moving workloads on the new cloud platform?
20. Who will perform the migration – will you be doing it by yourself or will it be a shared initiative?
21. Will the migration allow you to move applications and data to a new cloud platform?
22. What are the changed orders for the migration process?
23. Is the cloud service provider capable of giving you a detailed SOW in advance?
24. What is the success rate of the provider meeting the contractual requirements of cloud migration projects?
25. What the conditions under which you can terminate the contract?
It is not an easy decision to migration your company data and application in the cloud. If you wish to find all your answers in addition to the perfect cloud services provider, speak to one of our experts.
