Despite the technology being a few years old now, there is still a lot of cloud-related hype doing the rounds, and especially for those companies that have not had much experience engaging with external IT suppliers, separating the wheat from the chaff can be difficult. Therefore businesses need to be aware of several crucial factors in order to make their migration to the cloud as smooth and as fast as possible.

• Firstly, companies have to be aware of the content that is located in the cloud and the targets they aim to achieve, for example regarding quality, costs and flexibility. This is essential to get a suitable solution avoiding unnecessary costs. In the process of selection companies should choose a cloud provider who is able to create added value with innovation and a convincing operating model.

• Over-inflated promises of the providers are generally not trustworthy. Therefore references should be claimed in order to check the offers in terms of their cost benefits and quality.

• A specific drafting of a contract is very important. Every flaw should be excluded, otherwise after the contract is signed the customer can sometimes be showered with change requests, even regarding Configuration Management Database (CMDB) and customer-specific runbooks. Inevitably, this leads to expensive and unnecessary transition costs.

• In general, it should be clarified that the customer retains the entire control of its own IT, especially when it comes to critical business systems.

• Fast migration depends on the choice of the right cloud model which covers the customer’s needs and wants. Experience has shown that hybrid cloud services are popular because they unify the aspects of flexibility, scalability and data security.

• A monolithic outsourcing strategy can lead to there being a lack of expertise across all levels of the cloud management function; multi-sourcing however, allows a company to partner with different external suppliers who are specialised in a certain service. For this approach, only cloud providers without a “Vendor Lock-in” are qualified. This then brings with it its own issues of managing the delivery of multiple third parties and challenges in service governance. Businesses which deploy an overarching management platform to comprehensively orchestrate various cloud infrastructures will have the advantage of greater flexibility.

IT environments are, in general, very complicated infrastructures and therefore migrating a multitude of different applications to the cloud that each adheres to their own configuration is not a task that should be taken lightly. Choosing the right provider(s) to help make migration as painless as possible is the first step businesses will make in their migratory journey, and following these tips should help ease the transition.