The cloud has become an essential tool for business. In fact, a recent survey found that more than 90 percent of organizations have adopted the public cloud, with 75 percent adopting the private cloud. It’s clear that businesses are seeing the benefits of cloud migration, such as increased flexibility and lower costs. This translates to additional benefits and savings for companies with robust databases. By moving a database to the cloud, businesses can take advantage of the cloud’s elastic scalability to create space for database growth.

There are, however, some best practices for the process of migrating a database to the cloud, as recently discussed on the Mission Critical blog.

Migrate Applications and Databases Together

It doesn’t make sense to migrate a database to the cloud without also moving the application it supports. This ensures that the application and the data that supports it remain in close proximity to one another, hopefully preventing any outages. It also allows the scale to be adjusted according to demand.

Move Nonessential Applications and Databases First

In order to minimize downtime and the impact on customers, companies should initially only migrate applications and databases that are not mission critical. To identify these nonessential programs, look for those that have the least impact on customers, business operations and revenue. Also examine the security requirements, looking for applications and databases that require less security. Then, once those are migrated and the cloud scaled appropriately, should customer-facing applications and corresponding databases be moved.

Deploy Security Tools

Before and during migration, it may be beneficial to deploy security assistance tools into the cloud. This will allow for increased visibility and protection of the cloud environment, and will help monitor the effectiveness of the security tools put in place by the cloud provider.

Break the Database into Parts

Databases can be large and complex. To minimize customer impact and avoid issues affecting the entire database, migrate it in parts, following a strategic execution plan. There are some database conversion tools that can assist with this complicated task.

Migrating a database into the cloud can be complex, but Vaultas is here to help. We are a premier provider of IT solutions, providing data storage and backup, disaster recovery and business continuity services, hosting, colocation, cloud storage and more in Minnesota and Wisconsin. Contact us to get started.