eWay Corp You’ve done it. You’ve assessed your current business, analyzed its potential for growth, and found the best way to get your organization’s tried and true business practices from yesterday accelerated into the world of tomorrow with the cloud. But, what exactly are the steps to move to the cloud?
You’ve seen that it can offer a scalable pricing solution to bring up and down at the push of a button and you know that it will free your exhausted team of all the hard work that comes with in-house hosting servers. They’ll have the chance to advance the organization at an exponential rate nobody ever imagined possible until now. The excitement will be tangible. That may be true but approaching a massive change like this is still a change, and change isn’t always accepted with thunderous applause. That’s why working with your team on all levels of future use in your new cloud is key for delivering the business transformation at its full potential.
There are a number of steps that need to be taken when moving an entire business’s or even a portion of a business’s daily function applications into their own secure cloud, but we do that work for you as we keep the process of taking your applications and business to the next level of digital in the cloud. Just as the final outcome will free your entire organization to focus on company growth, our full-service experience will free your time during the process to make the cloud migration much less intimidating of a transition for your employees.
Here are five steps to move to the cloud that will help you and your team to prepare for this big change.
1. Educate them
There’s truth to the classic clichés of humans being “creatures of habit” or fearing the unknown. Something that is completely familiar is something that is comfortable and being comfortable is something worth keeping around. A new system change especially a cloud migration strategy that will make the employees in your company and its employees work with ease through multiple platforms and from beyond just at their workstation will bring more efficient, stress-free work and result in higher morale and productivity, but the initial changes and the process of migration won’t be universally understood as quickly as we’d like.
This is why providing reading material, webinars, and other forms of education for all employees is key to building space in your cloud for the typical employee to feel at home in even beyond your IT.
With the new changes, there won’t necessarily be a requirement for companywide user certifications, we make it as close to the original local system as possible, but building your IT teams strengths through certification will not only improve their abilities and scope of company-wide potential, but a small group of people with certification level knowledge can then assist in improving the education of the entire company giving a wider scope of understanding in even less time.
This education and general training is also key because large changes in a company will statistically create a general fear of job loss. This should not be an issue in the organization as training a team as opposed to hiring completely new is much more beneficial as it is cost-effective, scalable, and maintains a smoother cloud migration process. Educating your current employees will give them ease of mind as you have created value for them.
2. Promote the Transformation
Before any of the cloud migration begins, it’s key to communicate with the rest of the company in a positive manor. Throw announcement parties, launch parties, emails listing all the benefits. You’ve picked a partner in the migration process who sold you on making the move; now the time has come to make sure that the rest of your company understands just how much easier your life can be with the introduction of the latest in secure cloud technology. If you need a little help starting up your list, here are a few talking points to introduce to any employee:
- Access to applications from anywhere through the cloud
- Complete security through more advanced software and a dedicated team
- Virtually zero downtime or slow down due to regular updates.
3. Keep them informed
When working through the migration process, we know that your business never takes a break. That’s why our main focus is to make sure that nothing slows down or goes missing while migrating applications onto the cloud. We do however encourage you to inform your employees of where we are at in the process, so they can know what to expect just as we inform you of the progress for the exact same reason.
This is especially crucial when the date of making the complete switch to your new cloud system setup at the end of the project. There may be hiccups as the new routine begins, there may be confusion, but there can never be too much preparation.
4. Encourage and Reward
Your team works hard and deserves the proper praise in their day to day jobs. This encouragement is especially important during a major transition.
This can sometimes sound a little silly and that’s not always wrong. If someone is encouraged or rewarded with candy and a pat on the back might seem too childish to one person. But this just what someone else needs to push through a confusing time such as cloud migration.
It’s not always easy to figure this out, but you’ve been working with many of your employees for a long time and knowing them is likely an important part of your own position. Gauge your team’s motivations, consider the new education that you’re giving them, reward them for the hard work they do in accordance to what will encourage them to continue this momentum into tomorrow through our combined efforts in cloud migration. It doesn’t have to be a large gesture to all; sometimes a simple speech, letter, or pizza party will go a long way in what they have seen as a chaotic time.
5. Open Communication
The most important thing to do is listen to your team. eWay Corp works hard to make sure that the procedure is as smooth as possible. But there are always growing pains or frustrations when processes change and we want to make sure you, your employees and we all have a completely open line of communication.
A mistake we often see companies make is breaking this line of communication about cloud migration. Especially, shortly after the major project is completed and there hasn’t been any difficulties in a longer amount of time. Our team is constantly monitoring for security threats and checking in on any updates to keep everything running smoothly. We make sure to answer any of your or your team’s questions so that so long as your data is running on a cloud hosted by us, you’ll have the same on call support as you had when the project was initially under way.
Now that you know the steps to move to the cloud, it is time you decide on a trusted could migration service provider for the job.
eWay Corp is a digital solutions provider specializing in transforming your business challenges into opportunities. We do this by delivering deep knowledge, data-backed insights, automation and agility. Our global workforce of talented experts and consultants can implement custom-tailored transformative solutions to your business through our business units: digital, technology, infrastructure and consulting.
Our core competency centers around Cloud Computing, Managed Infrastructure and Security, Application Modernization, DevOps, and Enterprise Software Development. eWay Corp partners with Amazon Web Services, Microsoft, and Google to provide cost-effective digital infrastructures, empowering business leaders with the tools to confidently adapt to the digital world and accelerate their success.
