A Guide to Migrating Your Data Into The Cloud

Over 61% of companies around the world, have realized the potential for cloud storage and migrated online. Cloud migration is when businesses move all or some of their data centers into the cloud. This allows more security and reliability to the company’s data, among tons of other advantages.

By 2023, 75% of all companies‘ databases will run on cloud platforms. As you plan on making your first move to the cloud, you need to have detailed information on the right steps to follow. In this article, we explore the importance of moving your data to the cloud and guide you on how to make the transition.

Importance of Cloud Migration

Your customer satisfaction and improved experience are vital steps towards business success. Cloud migration and banking cloud migration allows digital transformation to your business, allowing mobile availability, flexible tools, and hence improved experience for your clients.

Apart from your clients and employees accessing your services from anywhere, there are advantages of migrating your data to the cloud, including:

Improved accessibility

Accessibility entails making your company’s services available and usable by as many people as possible. Most modern businesses are aiming for flexibility and accessibility to fit into the current markets. This cannot be possible if your data warehousing infrastructure limits your geographical location.

You need a mechanism to allow remote access and work, to allow operations in multiple countries all around the globe. Moving your data to the cloud ensures you reach more potential clients. There are control features where you can control who has access to specific data, and the operations they can perform on that data.

Despite many clients and employees accessing this data simultaneously, the access control features ensure no compromise of data integrity. You don’t have to worry about incompleteness, inconsistency, or inaccuracy in your data.

More Data Storage

One of the main reasons businesses are moving to the cloud is the increased storage size and options available. Cloud data allows you to pay as you go, meaning you only pay for what you need.

You can scale up storage space easily when you need an additional one, and scale down when you don’t need it any longer. This saves the costs that may arise from purchasing unnecessary storage devices that may later not be required by your company.

Scalability and Elasticity

A cloud data warehouse has a design that uses and focuses more on modern businesses. This architecture allows companies to adjust their resource allocation to fit into the changing business demands.

For example, tourism is a sector highly affected by seasons, security and weather changes. During high seasons, tourism companies will require more computational power than on normal days to enhance their analytics. Using such computational power in low seasons would be unnecessary, as you require very low processing power.

With the cloud data warehouse, such a company with seasonal and fluctuating needs can save money by paying for the resources when they need them.

Improved Performance

We usually have multiple servers sharing the load on a cloud data platform. These multiple servers ensure the storage of large amounts of data and quick simultaneous processing with no delays. Different departments call for different ways of data processing.

For instance, a marketing department might need insights from the data to conclude on the best marketing strategies to employ. The customer support system requires a different type of data to analyze clients’ feedback and make the required adjustments.

With a modern cloud data warehouse, all departments in an organization can access the data that best applies to them and make evidence-based decisions.

Enhanced Integration

According to a study, companies use over 400 sources of data for business intelligence and analytics. Data from different sources will appear in different formats and structures, making integration very difficult. Poor integration mechanisms would leave all this important data stuck in silos and lead to low-quality analytics.

Migrating to the cloud will enable you to integrate data from multiple sources with ease. The results will show a clear view of your organization’s activities and how it operates, hence producing more effective analytics.

Improved Disaster Recovery

Companies using legacy data platforms spend a lot of money trying to create data backups in case of disaster strikes. They also need to employ more skills to secure this backup data and control who can access it. Migrating to the cloud saves you from all these problems.

A cloud data platform will create data backups automatically regularly, to ensure very reduced effects in case of a disaster. You don’t need to purchase expensive hardware and storage areas for your backup, just subscribe to a solution and enjoy the automatic data recovery.

Steps to Migrate Your Data to the Cloud

When you are used to a certain way of doing things in your company, it is hard to change and adopt a new mechanism. You need to approach the change in a professional way to ensure a seamless transition and also enjoy the cloud benefits with minimal company disruption. Here are the seven key steps to follow to migrate and store your data in the cloud.

Understanding the Company’s Needs Driving the Migration

You should start by understanding why your company needs to make the move. This will entail weighing what parts stand to benefit from the transition and in what ways they are benefiting.

Follow your data to analyze the information you have, how you access it, its location, and the challenges you are facing. Understanding your business processes and the data you currently have will assist you in choosing the best solution for you.

Take a SWOT Analysis

SWOT stands for Strengths, Weaknesses, Opportunities, and Threats. This analysis is one of the most organized and best ways to understand your position as a company. List down your company’s strengths, weaknesses, opportunities, and threats. For example, if you have an online store and the highest threat is loss of data and your weakness is data security, you can easily conclude that you urgently need to migrate your data to the cloud for better security and reliability.

Identify the Applications to Migrate

After the SWOT analysis, you identify your focus and know what applications require the change. By now, you know why you are moving to the cloud, so you can tell what to prioritize. Start with the areas you stand more to gain and identify how you will gain.

Look at the numbers

This entails the cost of the transition. Once you identify your priorities, calculate the costs you will incur to migrate. As you know what you want now and the benefits you will get, you can easily compare this with the costs and determine whether the move is appropriate.

Calculate the space you need, the data you generate, and the service level agreements (SLAs) you might need, and this will help you get a solution that aligns with your budget and needs.

Choose the Right Partner

The right cloud partner is one who meets your needs and operates under your budget. You want to settle for a partner who has tangible experience in a similar industry, one who understands your needs and problems better. For instance, ClicData is a cloud data platform with a built-in cloud data warehouse to facilitate your migration and data management for analytics and reporting purposes. Hence, it will make your transition simple.

Plan Your Migration

As you migrate, ‌prioritize minimizing the disruption caused to your team as much as possible. Look at your schedule and come up with the best time to migrate. Also, determine the order of the transition and come up with some deadlines to ensure the process is fast enough to return your company to normal operation mode as fast as possible.

It is also important to identify the changes that the migration will cause the end user and whether they will require any training to continue receiving your services.

Monitor Your Operations

You should actively monitor how everything is working and be ready to fix any issues that may arise. Back up everything in case something goes wrong with the new system. Remember, your users are new to the platform and they can easily mess up with anything. Be ready to step in, in case something goes unplanned.

Using ClicData Cloud Data Platform

A cloud data warehouse such as ClicData will merge your company’s data and serve as a single repository where you can consult and decide on business moves. Cloud-hosted warehouses are replacing the on-premises frequently. This is because cloud hosts are cost-effective, more secure, more available and reliable, and come with more capabilities than on-premises.

ClicData is a business intelligence platform that will help connect your data from all your sources into a single warehouse. We then create beautiful and interactive dashboards for easy interpretation and automatic sharing. We are the leaders in functionality and user experience, as we value what we offer and to who we offer our services.

Our innovative and agile technology allows us to handle any data that our client will have. We ensure to make business intelligence simple and accessible to all businesses that may require it. For more information, learn more about our cloud data warehouse.