If a customer asks “How to move from the on-premises data center to the cloud?” there can be various reasons associated with the need of the customers. So, it is essential to identify the customer needs and provide them with the appropriate solutions. First, ask appropriate questions to derive the needs of the customer.
Why do you want to move from an on-premises data center to the cloud?
- Customer wants to quit using the data center and start using the cloud to enjoy the benefits of the cloud such as agility, scalability, durability, and pay only for the services that are being used.
- Customer is having performance issues in on-premises data centers that is requiring additional resources and manpower to manage the servers.
- Customer want to use new niche technologies or managed services that are available on cloud. for eg: containers, no sql.
What level of application migration or code change is acceptable to the customer?
- Customer is happy to completely redevelop their legacy applications
- Customer might want to keep the existing applications as is with minimal changes but are ready to use new technologies for any new developments.
What are the RTO/RPO disaster recovery strategies that customer is happy with?
- Ask about what is the Recovery time objective, how fast the customer wants the application to be online after the applicaiotn goes down. (maximum downtime)
- Ask about Recovery point objective, how many minutes, hours, or days of data loss is acceptable for cusotmer in case of disaster. (maximum data loss)
- What are the cost constrains whie deciding the disaster recovery strategies.