COVID-19 Remote Work: 5 Ways to Successfully Migrate to the Cloud

Due to the impact of the coronavirus epidemic, many employees are working at home. To support distance working, Many enterprises are undergoing cloud migration. In order not to delay the process of cloud migration, some strategic skills are needed to make the process of enterprise cloud migration go smoothly.

In the past month, IT experts have encountered a question: How to make the distance working labor force implement the cloud migration project? The difficulty is obvious. Considering the outbreak of the new coronavirus in the world, companies are forced to enter the distance working mode, while also accelerating the need for cloud migration. Some companies have started distance working, but many companies have not started distance working until recently.
There are two types of such enterprises: the first is an enterprise that has been adapting to distance working for many years and understands how to manage projects with employees who are not in the same location (such as most consulting companies). The second is a company that has little experience in managing distance working, and considers that processes, strategies, rules, and infrastructure are not in place, and finds that the current situation is very ineffective. In other words, they only visited during home isolation, but are now in recovery mode.

Every enterprise wants to move their business to the public cloud. However, when cloud migration workers and consultants work from home, they hardly know how to achieve this, but are looking for solutions.

Here are some suggestions for successfully implementing a distributed cloud migration project.

(1) Set up infrastructure for network connection. People will find that the bandwidth of many homes is not the same, and the high-speed Internet speed of some homes has not exceeded 10Mbps. Usually, this means that broadband services are restricted in these areas, and people rely on mobile hotspots or other measures for network connections.

These networks are called "bandwidth deserts", and unless 5G operations are started immediately, companies need to assign staff to provide short-term and long-term network solutions. In some cases, this also means paying a fee to build a dedicated network connection.

(2) Cultivate a culture of continuous communication. Experts urge the migration team to work “in minutes and seconds”, which has two purposes: First, let team members feel that everyone is working in this team and work towards a common goal. Second, you can make sure that every member understands what needs to be done every day to make a successful migration.

In addition, tools such as Slack and Yammer are recommended. It turns out that instant communication with team members, especially for ongoing artifacts, is actually more efficient than office work.

(3) If the company does not currently use a project management office (PMO). You need to build this central management and control platform. The cloud migration process faces complexity in terms of dependencies, deadlines, client interactions, artifacts, test plans, etc., making the Project Management Office (PMO) critical to the success of cloud migration. For a distributed workforce, the project management office (PMO) is more important.

(4) Cloud migration provides appropriate funding. In the short term, moving to distance working may require a large amount of capital, which usually means that the company management needs to ensure that a sufficient budget is provided. For most companies, this situation has changed to some extent. Under-funded migration projects not only fail, but also cost more in the long run, because doing wrong means paying later to repair.

(5) Use public cloud for development, testing and operation. Ironically: many cloud migration teams are still using on-premise tools for development. This weakness should now be obvious to every team. Enterprises need to promote the establishment of Devops solutions based on public clouds.