Transforming Your Higher Ed Organization with Cloud Migration

Cloud Solutions for Colleges and Universities

Migrating to the cloud offers a multitude of benefits like agility, scalability, and cost savings. Even though moving to the cloud has so many benefits, this move takes a comprehensive strategy to migrate the cloud successfully and efficiently. Utilizing Insight Public Sector through a cooperative, such as OMNIA Partners, helps you create a cloud strategy that reduces costs, accommodates distance learning and hybrid experiences, and enables greater innovation across your campus. This blog will provide an introduction to a successful, tested cloud migration strategy along with some other successful tips. 

Step 1: Analysis

The initial phases occur before migration and involves assessing the state of your IT infrastructure. This includes thoroughly examining your institution’s current IT operations, processes and personnel. This will determine your IT posture and how “cloud-ready” your institution is. Insight does this through data and organizational silo remediation. 

Step 2: Assessment 

After analysis, the assessment phase addresses your institution’s applications and application workloads for cloud migration. Many institutions are unfamiliar with their application workloads — meaning an application and all the associated dependencies required for it to operate effectively. Determining each will allow for optimal cloud placement for each application and workload. 

Step 3: Plan and Build 

Combining the data from the analysis and assessment phase, now it’s time to develop a comprehensive, detailed plan for cloud migration. Steps in this phase should include:

• Develop a cloud-based design that aligns with your institutional goals and compliance
• Incorporate cloud backup and disaster recovery
• Identify cloud providers and services and evaluate your needs against their services
• Build the cloud services foundation, like building sites and managing subscription accounts
• Implement storage, connectivity and computing options that fit your institutional needs
• Document your migration plan for current and future workloads
  

Step 4: Trial Run 

In this phase, you will test out multiple Proofs of Concept (PoC). Here, you can begin building and testing processes and validate their functionalities, deploy workloads and assess any areas that may need adjusting. Once you do this, you can start migrating nonproduction workloads as part of your trial run. In this phase, it’s critical to test how production workloads run and how your backup and disaster recovery processes work. 

Step 5: Go Live 

Finally, you can begin to migrate targeted production data and workloads into the cloud. You will still want to perform testing and validation as you go to make sure your migration is successful. In the final step, you will migrate your applications. 

Data and Organizational Silo Remediation 

To facilitate smooth cloud migration, it’s important to break down data and organizational silos that exist in higher education institutions. This allows existing silos to be assessed and identifies areas of integration. This will ensure that data is accurately shared and utilized across the entire organization after migration.

Multi-Cloud Services

The use of multiple cloud service providers leverages different cloud platforms to optimize costs. It will also improve efficiency and reduce reliance on a particular cloud service provider.

AI in Higher Education 

Migrating to the cloud also often serves as the foundation for more advanced digital transformation like application modernization and AI adoption. Integrating AI into higher education institutions means automating administrative tasks, enhancing academic research and improving the overall student experience.

Workloads Alignment for Cloud Environments 

As mentioned in the step-by-step cloud migration guide, aligning workloads is important in optimizing your cloud environment. To do this, your assessment phase will be critical in identifying workloads that are best suited to cloud environments and migrating those workloads to the cloud. This will optimize costs, improve efficiency and increase scalability of your migration.

Data Migration Services 

This refers to the process of moving data from on-premises systems to cloud-based systems. It involves data assessment, data mapping, data testing and data migration to ensure data is migrated safely and accurately.

Insight Public Sector & OMNIA Partners

We know migration to the cloud is complex and can be challenging without the right resources.  Through OMNIA Partners, participating agencies can utilize a cooperative contract with Insight Public Sector to create and implement a successful cloud migration strategy for their higher education program. Click below to download the full guide: