Reasons for Pilot Cloud Migration

Pilot cloud migration is an important step before large-scale cloud migration. It helps enterprises fully understand and evaluate various factors before large-scale migration. By piloting the cloud migration process and related configurations, enterprises can identify risks in advance and provide experience for large-scale cloud migration.

• Risk control: Cloud migration is a complex process involving different systems and services. Pilot cloud migrations let businesses test the full process on a smaller scale. They help spot and fix issues early, ensuring successful larger migrations. In addition, pilot cloud migrations can help enterprises identify risks and challenges. For example, some firms might struggle with adapting to the cloud. Through pilot cloud migrations, these problems can be exposed in a small scope and corrective measures can be taken in a timely manner to reduce risks during a full-scale migration.
• Feasibility verification: Pilot cloud migrations can verify whether enterprise applications and data can be migrated to the cloud. By selecting a small number of applications or businesses for pilot cloud migrations, enterprises can evaluate whether the compatibility, performance, security, and reliability of businesses in the cloud environment meet requirements. If some applications are not suitable for migration to the cloud, enterprises can re-plan migration strategies or find alternative solutions based on the evaluation results to prevent applications that are not suitable or difficult to migrate from being directly put into the production environment.
• Experience accumulation: Pilot cloud migrations help technical teams and business personnel of enterprises build hands-on experience. During this process, they can learn and get familiar with the features, functions, and best practices of the cloud platform, understand the migration tools and processes, and accumulate related knowledge and skills to prepare for subsequent full-scale migrations.
• Priority determination: Enterprises can evaluate the migration priorities of different applications or businesses through pilot migrations. Based on the pilot migration results, enterprises can determine which applications or businesses have little impact on cloud migration and migrate them first to promote the entire migration process in an orderly manner.
• Performance optimization: Pilot migrations allow enterprises to spot and fix performance issues early. Testing on a smaller scale helps check key application metrics like latency, throughput, and response time in the cloud. This approach identifies bottlenecks beforehand, enabling adjustments for better performance and user experience before the formal migration.
• Cost control: Pilot migrations help enterprises assess cloud migration costs effectively. By testing during this phase, enterprises gain clear insights into pricing models, resource usage, and potential hidden expenses. This prevents budget overruns and improves resource efficiency, ensuring better cost management.
• Team cooperation: A successful cloud migration depends on effective teamwork among all involved parties, such as the O&M team, development team, test team, cloud service provider, and third-party system provider. Pilot migrations help teams practice working together, and enable them to spot potential issues, assess risks, and plan solutions to ensure seamless collaboration during full-scale migration.