Every year thousands of enterprises and organizations make the important and wise decision to migrate vital systems and applications to the cloud. Embracing Cloud Services for your IBM i systems is a significant leap forward and requires a good deal of planning and consideration.
Working with the right CSP (Cloud Service Provider) is an important first step toward hosting your business data seamlessly, efficiently and cost-effectively. It’s also extremely easy. Ready to start the process? Let’s get going!
Migrating your IBM i system to the cloud offers numerous advantages over maintaining your systems on-site. From pure business and staffing considerations to technology and security reasons, embracing the cloud can make a significant difference in how you employ, manage, secure and protect your critical data and apps.
The beauty of the cloud is that it’s also scalable; as your business changes, the cloud accommodates those shifts, and capacity can be added as needed. As such, the cloud becomes something akin to a business partner that works as you do, and consistently has your best interests in mind.
As you consider the important step of migrating your IBM i systems to the cloud, there are several significant issues to keep in mind that will make the transition quick, efficient and worry-free. Let’s take a moment to review some of the aspects of shifting your IBM i systems to the Cloud, and how we make our clients’ transition simple. At CloudFirst, we’re with you every step of the way!
Before getting started on the cloud, you’ll need to provide some basic information about your company, including relevant contacts and any additional information related to the project. Once that’s completed, it’s time to get started.
Project Kickoff and Preparation
The first phase is Project Kickoff and Preparation. At the Kickoff, you’ll be introduced to the CloudFirst Service Delivery team assigned to your project. They’ll go over everything you need to get up and running, including Project Planning, Network Implementation, the Migration Process, testing, and final ‘go live’ planning.
Project Preparation
This is the next important step toward the CloudFirst Cloud. It consists of three areas to review and prepare for the migration. These are:
• Preparing the Business: This is about management buy-in and making sure key stakeholders are aware and prepared to make the transition a business priority. Everything from project resource identification, preparation of business documents and policy changes, management buy-in, customer requirements, impact analysis, and business continuity planning.
It further includes migration downtime planning, business user preparation, security planning, and coordination of corporate and external project requirements.
• Preparing the Application Owners: These are the people in your company who are most familiar with the applications that you’ll be migrating to CloudFirst Cloud. After taking an inventory of your applications and application owners, licensing, software versions and licensing keys will be reviewed. Application systems and upgrades will also be addressed at this stage.
• Preparing the IT Department: The people in your IT Department are the ones most integrally involved in the transition to CloudFirst Cloud. Their roles will be critical and varied, ranging from handling required tasks, providing documentation on systems, applications and connectivity, and integrations involving your IBM i systems. Preparation of the IT Department also includes time commitments for planning and implementation. Finally, it includes information on how system migration backups are handled. Additionally, we’ll provide information on Disaster Recovery and High Availability training if you implement CloudFirst’s ezAvailability and ezRecovery solutions.
These are all pivotal steps to a fully and successfully migrate IBM i systems to CloudFirst Cloud Services.
In our next installment, we’ll cover other important issues in the transition, including:
• Preparing your Network
• Preparing for Security and Compliance
• Completing Important Paperwork in Preparation for System Migration to CloudFirst Cloud Services
Considering embracing the cloud? At CloudFirst we’re always here to help answer questions regarding your business needs and the many benefits of transitioning to CloudFirst Cloud.
Please feel free to contact us for a consultation and a review of your current IBM i system status, and to learn how migrating to CloudFirst Cloud can mean a great leap forward for your organization.
