How to Build a Successful Cloud Migration Team

So you have decided to join the great digital shift and migrate your data to cloud systems, congratulations! Now comes the hard part, building a successful cloud migration team. Cloud migration is an inevitable process for all business organizations, especially startups. Cloud migration will open new level for your business, and you can find in our article what opportunities exactly you can have.

It is the way to increase IT efficiency, improve IT cost optimization, and improve performance. But migrating is not an easy task. It requires a lot of planning and preparation. To be successful, you need to build a team that will be responsible for the process.

A good team consists of knowledgeable people with several years of experience in various areas of IT. You’ll find out what cross-skills and experience can make cloud developers great contributors to your future success. This article is a complete Cloud Migration guide to illuminate your way through moving your data to a cloud system.

Benefits of an Experienced Cloud Migration Team for Your Organization

Cloud migration is a complex process that requires expert knowledge in cloud infrastructure, security and networking, as well as business analytics and process optimization skills. It is not just about turning your data center machines off and moving them away from the physical servers.

It involves risk analysis, data migration, security, compliance and more. Ultimately, this gives your business new opportunities to scale its operations in an efficient manner.

1. Strategic Direction

Cloud migration can give strategic advantages. Not only does it require taking into account the current infrastructure and available resources, but also planning for the future. An experienced cloud migration team would provide expertise and experience in successful cloud migration and guidance at each stage of the process. This would help you to minimize risks as you undergo the journey to digital transformation.

2. Optimization of Resources

A cloud migration team structure of experienced professionals helps you gain the insight and tools you need to manage your cloud environment, so you can focus on what matters most: building your business. With professional cloud migration you can optimize financial, manage, security resources.

By optimizing these resources, your business can focus on innovations, excellence of customer experience and business goals to win a market competition.

3. Data Protection and Security

Having a cloud migration team at hand helps you to protect user data. This translates into confidence in your business and ultimately, more sales. Unlike hiring freelancers who are unreliable, hiring a cloud migration team helps you to secure your business model for unique market delivery. If there is any leak, you can easily trace the fault.

The team also manages the server, protecting your business from common attacks such as DDOS attacks. Only a business that is secure can optimally and without interruption.

4. Reliability and Efficiency

Hiring a cloud migration team helps you to mitigate and even eliminate costly mistakes that might be committed by an inexperienced in-house team or unreliable freelancers. Such mistakes include deployment errors, cybersecurity attacks, and compliance issues that may derail your business and cause loss.

By outsourcing your project to a ProCoders’ team, you are guaranteed constant availability of developers for the execution of your project. This is important if you must make quick changes or accelerate the deployment timeline.

Cloud Migration Team Structure. Roles and Responsibilities of A-Level Members

1. Cloud architect

Just like buildings require architects, teams involved in data migration to cloud also need an architect to design and develop cloud environments and migration strategies. Basically, this professional designs the technical architecture to be implemented. Some skills required include:

• Programming experience
• IT infrastructure engineering and DevOps
• Cybersecurity
• Operating system and networking

2. Cloud engineer

Different from software engineers, cloud engineers build, deploy, and manage cloud computing systems and storage. They write the software that allows users to access, store, and retrieve data across networks of servers.

They also configure software on the servers as well as network and hardware infrastructure to ensure it is running smoothly. Finally, they monitor the performance of the entire system to identify potential issues in advance. Skills:

• Data-oriented programming languages
• Networking
• Virtualization
• System engineering

3. Systems administrator

Systems administrators are responsible for managing the cloud computing environment by monitoring the performance of the network and the servers. They are basically responsible for providing the daily management and support of the organization’s cloud environment. Skills:

• Networking and virtual machines
• Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS) and Platform as a Service (PaaS)
• Shell scripting and programming languages
• Web services and server technologies

4. Security manager

Within teams involved in migration to non-physical storage, Security Managers are responsible for designing, implementing, and maintaining security within the virtual environment. These professionals analyze security policies and evaluate compliance to ensure that applications and services adhere to the highest security standards and best practices. They also manage authentication, authorization, and user access privileges for cloud resources.

Skills:

• Cybersecurity
• Programming languages
• Risk management
• Software deployment and configuration

+ Newer trends and innovations such as:

• Blockchain in cloud security
• Cloud Security Posture Management
• DevSecOps
• Zero-Trust Model

5. Compliance specialist

They work with other departments, such as security, to ensure the organization is in compliance with privacy standards regarding the deployment and management of virtual resources. They must have expert-level knowledge of privacy and security issues related to cloud solutions. Skills:

• Knowledge of various certification standards
• IT infrastructure operations
• Rights management
• Risk management

6. Executive sponsor

The executive sponsor is the person who will take responsibility for the success of the project and make sure that you meet your deadlines and deliverables within budget and without sacrificing quality. They are also responsible for creating an environment, interfacing with a project manager, that will enable teams involved in data migration to cloud to meet their goals.

Every enterprise is different, so the role of the executive sponsor will vary, but it’s essential that there’s some senior-level commitment to the plan of the project. It can’t just be a technology initiative. The sponsorship should be strategic and not necessarily tactical, as this will ensure that the entire organization works together and stays on track.

In-House or Outsourced Cloud Migration Team: What to Choose?

One challenge of hiring in-house is that cloud computing talents, in general, are difficult to find. This is due to a myriad number of reasons. According to A Cloud Guru’s State of Cloud Learning Report 2020, over 80% of cloud leaders report not achieving success due to the lack of internal skills and knowledge.

As the industry faces stiff competition in hiring relevant professionals, the available ones are priced very high, often beyond the budgets of many enterprises. By the way, cloud migration is not a regular IT project. At the same time, the migration is a one-time activity, but ongoing support is required. As such, it is more financially prudent to outsource it to a cloud migration team.

Therefore, many businesses willing to migrate have been looking towards outsourcing the projects to third-party teams to manage the process. Outsourcing helps businesses to optimize financial costs not only on hiring but also on cloud infrastructure. Outsourcing migration and management to an outsourced team means that the team supplies the infrastructure and tools to manage operations.

That is not to say that outsourced migration is entirely rosy. Putting a third party in charge of yours and your customer’s data can be disastrous for privacy and security. Those aspects are better managed in-house, where you can have full control and visibility over the entire process.

However, some IT teams such as ProCoders grant their clients full control over their tech initiatives so that nothing is left in untrusted hands. If you are hiring outsourced teams involved in data migration to cloud, it is always important to clarify data privacy and security requirements to ensure that no issues arise during the execution of the project.

Offshore Cloud Migration Team: Where to Find?

Having discussed the main challenge with dedicated in-house teams, which is hiring, it is important to discuss one of the most efficient ways to create your team, which is offshoring. Offshoring is basically outsourcing a project to a country other than yours.

By the way, freelance platforms such as Upwork, Toptal, Arc, Fiverr, and the likes are great places to hire professionals for this type of project. However, you have to deal with the hassle of screening candidates and so on. In most cases, it is better to hire a company that has vetted professionals with on-demand access to them.

If your business is set up in North America or anywhere in most of Europe, you are probably the hardest hit with cloud migration professionals salaries. So, what if you could outsource the project to professionals living in another country where the salaries are lower, thereby saving your company money? Of course, this is a viable option.

For example, Ukraine is a popular destination for IT project outsourcing, due to the abundance of affordable talents to hire. This does not mean the quality of work is subpar, though. Rather countries like Ukraine, India, Mexico, China, etc. have a lower cost of living, which in turn reduces the cost of hiring professionals.

More so, these countries have thriving tech hubs and their professionals are proficient in global languages such as English, making them suitable to hire remote developers.

ProCoders, which is based in Ukraine, is an IT company that helps businesses assemble teams involved in migration to the virtual computing world to execute their IT needs. So, if you are looking to migrate, do not discount offshore hiring. It is an important secret that can help you lower your spending and execute on a budget.

How to Set up a Cloud Migration Team of Experts

Again, migration is not a single task. The migration project steps are different, and setting up a cloud migration team structure involves more than just hiring people.

1. Business requirements

Before you can even start to think about building a team, you must decide what your migration goals are, which may be to drive business flexibility, enable a new business model, or optimize operations. An organization needs to define clearly why it expects a virtual system. The clearer your aims, the more successful your migration.

What problem do you want to solve? Is it to gain better visibility, to gain better scalability, to reduce costs, or all of the above? How you answer these questions would help you to determine what business value your migration will bring and how successful the process would be. We can help you with the tech planning for the business through our Discovery Phase.

2. Assemble your team

Your team might include experienced cloud developers, BA, QA engineers. Prior, we have identified some of the major positions to be filled as you embark on building your cloud migration team. You want a team that can handle all the challenges involved in moving your operation to virtual storage.

Some extra training may even be required as this is a project that requires specialized skills, from Linux to networking to virtualization, so you must be prepared to choose based on the right skills, even if you are hiring outsourced teams involved in the migration.

3. Establish responsibilities

Decide how the migration should be organized and clarify who will do what, when, and how. Some sets of roles seem to overlap such as security manager and compliance specialists or engineer and architect. However, you must properly clarify the tasks assigned to each person to ensure efficiency. This separation ensures that no one on the team gets bogged down with part of the system they are not qualified for.

4. Standardize processes

Cloud project management is a full-time process that requires a team of experts, and migration is just the beginning. Whether you use an internal team or an external cloud provider, there are standard processes that must be in place for any successful project.

By implementing these processes before the migration starts, you will prevent many of the pitfalls that can occur during the process such as underestimating timelines, which may lead to poor execution. More so, not only must you migrate all of your data, but there are also a lot of other things you need to consider after migration.

Roughly, cloud migration process consists of 7 steps: refactor, replatform, repurchase, rehost, relocate, retain, and retire. The process of cloud maintenance is continuous and includes: monitoring, updating and developing cloud infrastructure due to new challenges business and cloud environment will give.

To have all the benefits of cloud migration and post-cloud migration, you must have a complete migration strategy that includes management and maintenance.

Build a Cloud Migration Team with ProCoders

Cloud migration is a complex and time-consuming project for startups and large enterprises alike, especially when it comes to planning and budgeting. If you are planning to migrate your IT systems, it is important to select a partner who can help you through the entire process. ProCoders can be that partner for you.

With years of experience and extensive knowledge of the IT industry, ProCoders has developed a unique staff augmentation approach to building a successful cloud migration team and migrating data to the virtual platform.

Our experts can effectively help your company resolve any challenges you may be facing in your migration project, such as high costs and poor deployment. The ProCoders team of experts provides you with the resources you need to migrate with confidence, expertise and cost-efficiency.

Conclusion

Building a cloud migration team can be a challenge and an opportunity at the same time. There are a number of factors to consider, from the team itself to the technology. In this blog post, we have explored the importance of building a successful migration collaboration and how to make it happen.

ProCoders’ teams involved in migration to the cloud are here to help you with all of your needs, providing you with access to cloud architects, engineers, system administrators, security managers, etc. We offer a suite of services designed to help you navigate the virtual world and move your business forward. From migration to ongoing management and maintenance, we’re here to simplify the process and save you time and money. Contact us today.