The knitted relationship between Cloud Migration and Covid-19

The pandemic caused businesses to adopt remote models of work, and this caused them to accelerate cloud adoption. Cloud services have proven to be key to maintaining the operations of companies in these times of crisis.

 

BitTitan, a global leader in cloud migration services and managed services automation, has remained at the forefront of the cloud industry, and has helped companies migrate to the cloud in a safe and effective way. This exclusive interview with Brad Rosairo, BitTitan Director of Business Development, Asia Pacific, zeroes in on the benefits, strategies, and future scope of cloud migration. 

 

 

Cloud Migration and COVID-19

 

“The concept of cloud migration is the process of moving or migrating info, programs, resources, emails, workloads, applications, and more to store in the cloud instead of onsite legacy infrastructure.”

 

Although the use of cloud services and cloud migration in businesses have been growing consistently for several years, the pandemic has sped up the shift.

 

“The impact of COVID-19, and the resulting shift to a more remote workforce, has led to increased demand for enterprise cloud services. More businesses needed to leverage cloud services to support remote employees working from various locations and enabling them to access on-premise information, tools, and resources from the company server. The result of the pandemic and the stay-at-home orders kind of quickly forced many businesses to leverage cloud services to support remote workers and continue business as usual.”

 

So the acceleration of cloud adoption witnessed during the pandemic, even if it was unplanned, has proven to be a much-needed and beneficial direction, as these businesses now enjoy “increased agility, reduced costs, improved employee productivity and modernized workflows.”

 

Rosairo anticipates that the demand for cloud services will continue to grow and that “using cloud-based technologies will be the "norm" for most businesses,” and thinks that this growth in dependence will improve the pace and overall agility of the business world. A lot of businesses have already integrated it into their business completely.

 

He talks about BitTitan’s experience in particular, and how they “saw that many managed service partners (MSPs) were faced with a surge of urgent customer requests to quickly move organizations to the cloud and deploy cloud technologies.” Recognizing this customer need, BitTitan offered a Remote Workforce Enablement Kit. This helped “MSPs accelerate migrations for businesses that immediately needed to leverage cloud services and enable a remote workforce,” he says.

 

 

Things to Keep in Mind with Cloud Migration

 

Businesses and professionals may have several qualms and may be wary of cloud adoption, mostly due to concerns regarding cybersecurity. Rosairo dispels these misconceptions and says that the cloud can actually help enhance security in case of attacks and breaches.

 

“Information stored in the cloud is likely to be more secure than files, images, and videos stored on employees' own devices as cloud vendors rely on far more robust cybersecurity measures. “

 

Recommended blog - 7 Best Data Security Practices

 

So the important thing before cloud adoption is being aware of the proper steps to do things, and to make informed decisions, to ensure a safe and efficient process of migration.

 

He suggests the questions that an IT professional should keep in mind before implementing a cloud migration process:

 

• What are the key factors/benefits that the business or IT team seeks in a cloud vendor (and a cloud migration solution)? What are the critical factors for making such a decision (product cost, security, customer service support from the vendor, etc.)?

• What resources and programs would the IT team like to migrate to the cloud? 

• When would be the best time to implement the migration process to minimize downtime for employees?

• How many users could be affected by the cloud migration process? What is the best way to inform them of this process to minimize disruption?

• How secure is the IT team/business' current data, and what steps are needed to ensure such data will remain secure during the migration process? 

• What would the company's training plan entail to ensure employees can quickly adopt and utilize the new programs and resources from the cloud?

 

There are also complexities of data sovereignty issues associated with cloud migration, which need to be kept in mind.

 

“Data sovereignty, where IT managers must keep data in compliance with a country's or region's laws, has become an emerging concern among businesses and IT professionals. One way to overcome the data sovereignty issue is for a company to take a hybrid approach to cloud migration, where it can choose what data to deploy to the off-premises cloud and what data to keep onsite.”

 

 

Future of Cloud Services

 

“The future looks very good for the evolution of the cloud! As more and more companies migrate their data to the cloud, issues like security, cost, and customer service support will become even more critical for cloud vendors to provide and compete on.”

 

Rosairo adds that the cloud vendor market is expected to become “even more competitive and saturated, and thus vendors will need to reassure businesses that they are the best vendor to meet those needs.”

 

Recommended blog - Cloud Computing Tutorial: Types, Benefits & Future Scope

 

Due to the flexibility and scalability of customers, he expects that cloud services will be the future of all businesses, regardless of size or industry.

 

“Due to its ability to quickly scale up or down to meet a company's particular needs, the cloud is an ideal solution for all businesses. Cloud solutions are easily customizable and offer improved employee productivity, and companies can pay for what they need. This efficiency and cost structure can benefit any business, no matter the size.”

 

As for BitTitan, they plan to stay in front of this growth in the cloud industry. With their acquisition of Perspectium in April 2021, BitTitan is ready to take on the expanding IT Service Management (ITSM) market, which is predicted to grow to $12.2 billion by 2025.

 

“Integrating Perspectium's solutions with our MigrationWiz and Voleer platforms will enable us to provide significantly more benefits to customers as they move to the cloud. In addition, with Perspectium, BitTitan will more easily support and bring new products to Microsoft, Google, and Amazon customers.”

 

He concludes by saying that they are “committed and well poised to serve IT professionals worldwide,” and will “continue to evolve and expand to ensure we stay in that position for our customers.”

 

“For BitTitan, and the cloud industry in general, the future is bright.”

 

 

About BitTitan

 

BitTitan has migrated over 25 million users to the cloud for 46,000 customers in 188 countries and supports leading cloud ecosystems including Microsoft, Amazon, Google, and ServiceNow, with Perspectium enabling more than 75 billion ServiceNow transactions. The company operates globally with offices in Seattle, San Diego and Singapore.

 

Looking at the services BitTitan offers, MigrationWiz, Voleer, and Perspectium are their major products, and Rosairo describes these as-

 

“MigrationWiz is the industry-leading SaaS solution for mailbox, document, public-folder, and Microsoft Teams migrations between a wide range of sources and destinations. Voleer centralizes and automates IT tasks to optimize IT environments, enabling IT service professionals to effectively manage resources, security, data governance, and more. And Perspectium eliminates data and process silos with integration solutions for ServiceNow, automating data transfers for analytics, backup and restoration, migrations, archiving, and extending ServiceNow workflows to other vital applications or external service providers.”