Data Migration to the Cloud: Benefits and Best Practices

Key Takeaways:

• Cloud migration enhances agility, cuts operational costs, and helps you stay compliant with evolving regulations.
• Maintaining data integrity during cloud migration is essential to ensure reliable and high-quality data for better decision-making and future use in advanced applications.
• Partner with the right providers that offer both technical tools and expertise within your industry and use cases.

Is your business getting ready to migrate your data to the cloud? While this may have once been seen as a strictly technical move, today it’s become an important strategic decision for organizations across sectors.

Why now? With driving factors including evolving regulatory demands, the need for cost efficiency, and an emphasis on agility, companies are shifting their data to the cloud to unlock new opportunities, streamline processes, and future-proof their operations.

If cloud migration is on your priority list, read on to find out about the benefits, best practices, and more – so you can ensure a smooth and successful journey that keeps your data secure, compliant, and ready for the future.

Unlocking Agility, Cost Savings, and Regulatory Compliance in the Cloud

Making the move to the cloud opens the door to new opportunities that benefit businesses of all kinds – regardless of your unique use cases and objectives. Here’s a look at a few of those top advantages.

Driving agility that the market demands
Your business needs the flexibility required to quickly adapt to new demands – especially amid unpredictable market conditions, demanding customer expectations, and the ever-evolving regulatory landscape.

Migrating your data to the cloud empowers this kind of agility on a level that traditional IT infrastructures simply can’t match. After all, this ability to quickly and effectively pivot when needed is the promise of the cloud in the first place.

Cloud platforms provide you with the resources you need on-demand. For example, before cloud technology came into the picture, provisioning a new server could take weeks – involving physical hardware procurement and setup. Now, with cloud solutions, you can provision a server in a matter of minutes. With the click of a button, you’re able to experiment with new technologies or services faster.

Cutting operational costs
Cloud migration also supports long-term cost savings by reducing your operational overhead. Traditional, on-prem infrastructure often requires substantial investment in both hardware and ongoing maintenance. As your systems age, operational costs grow – including the cost of staffing highly specialized individuals to manage legacy technologies.

Migrating to the cloud reduces these expenses by eliminating the need for in-house hardware maintenance and shifting to a scalable model where you only pay for the resources you use.

For example, many organizations are now sunsetting older, more expensive systems in favor of cloud technologies that are more widely understood and easier to staff for. Modern cloud solutions often leverage programming languages and frameworks taught in universities – so when you embrace these technologies that are more familiar to the workforce at large, you can reduce skill gaps and lower staffing costs.

This transition to cloud-based systems not only cuts your operational expenses, but it also means you can redirect your resources toward innovation that builds competitive advantage.

Staying compliant with evolving regulations
Navigating an increasingly complex regulatory environment is complicated – but cloud migration can help you succeed with greater standardization in your processes.

To stay compliant with global data privacy regulations, you need robust data protection practices in place. When you migrate your data to the cloud, you gain access to built-in security features like encryption, multi-factor authentication, and advanced monitoring capabilities.

Leveraging security offerings like these in the cloud means you can meet these evolving requirements with ease – all while reducing the risk of non-compliance that can lead to significant financial penalties and damage to your brand reputation.

This combination of agility, cost savings, and standardization positions companies to stay competitive while reducing risk in the face of changing regulations.

Ensuring Data Integrity in Cloud Migrations

To maximize all of the benefits of cloud migration, data integrity needs to be a priority throughout the process. You rely on accurate and trustworthy data to drive better decision-making – and anomalies in your data are all too common.

Best practices for keeping data consistent and error-free during migration include not only addressing data integration, but also data quality and governance. This means:

• having a comprehensive view of your data and where it comes from
• ensuring its accuracy
• maintaining its quality over time

By taking a proactive approach to data governance and implementing the right tools, you can ensure that your migrated data is reliable and ready for use in advanced applications like AI and analytics. Building this trust in your data is key to unlocking its full potential in the cloud.

Navigating Cloud Hesitancy and Choosing the Right Partners

Even with the clear advantages, some organizations are still hesitant to migrate data to the cloud.

Security and privacy concerns

The risk of exposing sensitive data to the cloud is seen as a barrier to adoption – particularly for industries like financial services and insurance. But, this hesitancy can be addressed by taking a more cautious, phased approach to cloud migration.

For example, a hybrid model allows companies to move non-sensitive workloads to the cloud while keeping more sensitive data on-premises. Hybrid models are becoming more prevalent in today’s IT environments as organizations gain confidence in the security capabilities of cloud providers. The flexibility of a hybrid model allows your business and technical users to reap the value from their data as new technologies are added to the IT environment.

A shift in cost structure

The costs associated with cloud migration can also create a significant barrier for organizations, particularly those that are used to the more predictable expenses of on-prem infrastructure.

Moving to the cloud comes with a different cost structure than traditional on-prem systems. You’re no longer paying for fixed infrastructure costs, but instead, you’ll be paying for the resources you actually use – like CPU time, data storage, and bandwidth.

Planning for these costs is essential to avoid surprises. Keep an eye on your usage patterns, and work closely with your cloud vendor to forecast future expenses. By understanding your current needs and aligning them with long-term plans, you can better manage costs and avoid budget overruns.

Overcome challenges with the right partner

With these concerns and others in mind, choosing the right partner to guide you through this process will be key to your success. But where do you start? What do you look for?

It comes down to two important factors: technology and expertise.

The right partner will offer the technical tools you need for migration, and do so in a flexible and strategic way that meets the unique needs of your business and builds long-term, end-to-end value.

Partners with proven expertise can anticipate potential roadblocks and provide solutions that align with both your current and future business needs – all of which amounts to a smooth and successful transition to the cloud.

Make Your Data Migration to the Cloud with Confidence

Embracing cloud migration now will position your business for success in the years ahead. Migration offers opportunities for innovation, cost efficiency, and business agility that just aren’t possible with traditional IT infrastructure.

But to fully realize these benefits, you have to approach cloud migration strategically. That means understanding your organization’s strengths and weaknesses, knowing where to leverage your internal expertise and where to bring in external support, partnering with the right vendors, maintaining a strong focus on data integrity, and managing costs proactively.

Learn more in our Buyer’s Guide and Checklist for Data Integration, where you’ll discover the 10 key features to help you choose a vendor that offers both software and an approach that can grow and change with your organization.