Credit Union Cloud Part 12: Migration
by. Kirk Drake
If you have been following our Credit Union Cloud series we are getting near the end. The last post, Credit Union Cloud Security, addressed the financial impact cloud computing will have on credit unions. In this post we address how a credit union will migrate to the cloud. By definition, Cloud is a remote service. Typically a customer will access the cloud resources over their Internet connection. Or a customer might have a dedicated private circuit to their cloud provider if performance or privacy issues dictate. Ultimately, you should make sure that however you are getting to the cloud has redundancy and resiliency built into the solution.
If you are thinking about getting out of the technology business, focusing on your core competencies, and doing what you do best – Cloud Computing might be for you. That being said – there are number of considerations in the decision. There are essentially two options for moving to the cloud – phased in over time or the all in approach.
All in Approach
In our opinion – this approach is really only for small businesses of around 10 to 50 employees or businesses that have very little technical complexity. If this describes your business it is a pretty easy transition. Move your e-mail accounts, your phones and a few documents – and you should be good to go. Start by figuring out how many employees you have, which applications (word, project, adobe etc) they have and how much file server data you have today. Then you should be able to get a quote and explore how to do the migration.
Phased Approach
If you have more than 25 employees you will want to look closer at how you will move the cloud. If you want to move overtime – we recommend picking a key piece of infrastructure such as Telecom, VOIP, Disaster Recovery, or Messaging and moving those to the cloud first. With each of these you will most likely integrate your existing or legacy infrastructure with your trusted secure cloud provider.
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