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If you’re like most enterprises, migrating applications to the cloud is part of a bigger strategy for improving the customer experience, increasing agility and integrating data, and better understanding the customer. The cloud also offers infrastructure cost reduction and scalability, and you can turn updates and troubleshooting over to a service provider.

But migrating applications to the cloud isn’t as simple as flipping a switch. You need to make some decisions about openness and how things outside the data center can still impact your customers and your systems. Here are three keys for a successful migration to the cloud:

Choose the right platforms for your migration. In order to ensure that you meet your goals for improving the customer experience, it’s important to consider infrastructure of the platform provider. The equipment used in your provider’s data centers will have a direct impact on your customers. Once you’ve identified a provider that meets your other requirements, such as past performance and reputation, it’s time to dig into their infrastructure a bit:

• What recent investments has the provider made in their infrastructure?
• Are they able to accommodate your scaling needs and growth?
• How often do they upgrade infrastructure equipment?
• What are the terms of the service level agreement (SLA)?
• What is the web application security offered?
• Can the provider support a multi-cloud approach?

Embrace openness. In order to optimize performance, you may be embracing a multi-cloud strategy and using a mix-and-match of cloud architectures and workloads. This demands that you embrace openness and flexibility. Select providers who use open standards and open source technology, and who are experienced with cross-platform interoperability.

You’re looking for a provider that makes it easy for you to move workloads between your on-site data centers and multiple cloud centers, including theirs. This approach will also be popular with your development team, who can work most efficiently with modern, open source tools for customizing and managing apps.

Monitor pathways and internet traffic. You can have great applications and choose the ideal provider, but your customers are still dissatisfied if they can’t access your applications quickly and conveniently. There are a lot of factors that can negatively impact access, including natural disasters, congestion and misconfiguration. No matter what the cause, the result is lost revenue for your business.

The key is to monitor and manage the internet pathways to determine what’s ideal for optimal performance. There are managed Domain Name Systems that allow you to monitor and react to any outages or congestion in the network.

Migrating applications to the cloud offers an opportunity for you to gain a competitive edge through an improved customer experience. The Xceptional Cloud system offers a range of services from desktop to disaster recovery and beyond. Just get in touch with us at Xceptional to learn more.