Taking full advantage of any cloud transition means choosing online platforms and services that offer rich functionalities while being secure and user-friendly. There are several ways in which using Google Cloud can save you time, money, and effort, thus, helping businesses grow and achieve increased performance.

Google has already won the trust of businesses all over the world with their Cloud Services. More and more companies are migrating to Google Cloud due to its secure and adaptable solutions that are known to be saving money and offer almost instant scaling of any online platform or solution.

4 benefits of Google Cloud Migration

Many companies have been running their systems on-premise for decades and have been reluctant to harness the benefits of Cloud Migration. But as Cloud Services have transformed IT and businesses, on-premise hosting has become harder to justify. Google Cloud comes with several benefits, but as we focus on a Google Cloud Migration, we have selected the following main benefits of this endeavour:

Higher productivity and less disruption

Google provides its network to every system for more control and scalability. Furthermore, it automatically creates backups of components, so that in case of disruption, the reparatory actions can be immediate.

Remote work and collaborative environment

Full access to information across devices from anywhere in the world is granted through web-based apps powered by Google Cloud. Users can work together on projects at the same time as data is stored in the cloud instead of their physical devices.

Less Data stored on devices

Only functional data is on computers, with the rest being stored in the Cloud and minimising the chances to get compromised. This data can be further optimised for enhanced results and readability.

Higher uptime and reliability

If a data centre is not available, the system immediately can fall back on a secondary centre without any service interruption being visible to users. This means that downtime can be reduced, thus increasing profitability.

What you should be paying attention to?

If you decided that Google Cloud benefits your business, the next step is to find the easiest way to implement it in your company as soon as possible. When planning your migration, your strategy should cover the necessary arrangements to assess the existing infrastructure and make the transition run smoothly.

Apart from the importance of keeping the system running while reducing system complexity, disruptive factors should be taken into consideration. All companies face specific challenges and you must be ready to assess your challenges and then cross unexpected grounds when migrating.

But what should you be focusing on when the migration path lies ahead?

Our expertise with platform-based warehousing solutions helped us deliver stable and performant cloud systems to our clients. During our work on several projects, we had to surpass and find solutions to some important challenges such as:

• Ensure a smooth migration path: enable seamless migration from concept to the Cloud go-live

• Properly respond to system size and complexity: during the projects we usually have to migrate numerous servers and big amounts of data, with great care to prevent data loss or data corruption.

• Ensure a minimal system downtime during and after the migration: for each system together with the client, we decide upon accepted system downtimes. Depending on the business type, this can vary from a few seconds to days/system. Also, in some cases we had to create different scripts to automatically stop and start the systems during night-time and weekends, thus optimising costs and reducing to a minimum the possible losses resulted from downtime.

• Time to market: time is money, so ensuring that the migration is undergone in a minimal period is highly important for our clients.

A tactical approach to Google Cloud Migrations

As mentioned before, system complexity stands in the way of many process optimisations for improved results. Depending on your company's business activity, daily you might be using one, two or more operating systems, platforms, and tools. If keeping the lights on takes a lot of technical resources, you should be interested in what you get back by from investing in your software and hardware. In several cases, we see that the outcome is a slight increase in performance, but a lack of adaptability to future requirements and business growth.

This is usually when our clients decide to change tactics. We often see businesses struggling because of the lack of strategic approaches when dealing with migration and modernisation issues.

After a thorough analysis, we constantly suggest the easiest way to migrate to the Cloud and allow the systems to operate with the minimal required operating and database systems.

When migrating to Google Cloud, we go for a five-step approach:

Project assessment

The first step is to make an on-premise landscape analysis, drafting the preliminary sizing. Then we normally create the Target Architecture providing all the details of the future state of the architecture being developed. As part of this phase, we undergo an Infrastructure discovery assessment.

Preparation of the migration plan

As part of this phase, the target sizing, the target technical architecture, and the technical migration plan are established. Also, during this period, we provide a High Availability/Disaster Recovery proposal that also considers different cost models.

Migration to the Cloud

Only after preparing and securing clear scenarios and high availability, we set-up the Cloud Infrastructure. The team ensures the data replication to the Cloud and the take-over in Cloud.

Handover procedures

As a standard in all our approaches, we want to empower our clients with all the information necessary to have ownership over a platform. We deliver all the needed documentation, together with the setup procedures, a disaster recovery simulation, and technical monitoring in the Cloud.

Continuous monitoring and improvement

In this phase, we ensure all the daily operations and script-based automation needed for resource optimisation and infrastructure administration. This is maybe the longest phase and the one the ensures minimal disruption for the client.

Results of a Google Cloud migration

Results vary depending on the implementation. However, cloud migrations come with the advantages of higher stability, availability and decreased costs.

For every Google Cloud Migration project, especially the ones for which the team creates a new architecture and implements the five steps described above, we enable a fully optimized system that guarantees availability in case of a disaster.

Google Cloud allows the platform to operate with less technical resources in terms of both hardware and software. With the help of the Cloud capabilities, all the time needed for scaling up or out, creating new systems, or system decommissioning decreases.

Along the years we have seen that no matter the cloud provider, thorough preparation of the migration plan ensures that an almost invisible transition to the Cloud to the end-users. So, all possible losses that might've resulted from eventual downtime are minimised.

To conclude:Google Cloud enables a scalable, robust infrastructure system able to support your company in its business growth. A correct cloud migration allows your business to achieve maximum efficiency and increases the general end-customers' satisfaction.

Therefore, resources will be automatically scaled based on real-time demand, thus optimising costs and enhancing the overall business performance.