Personal experience of cloud migration

How and why I moved my business to cloud technologies

For more than 10 years, I was the CEO and founder of a large educational center for professional additional education in the field of engineering. Now, due to the pandemic, we are going through a difficult period of digital business transformation.

Our educational activities were based on offline courses that took place in classrooms and involved personal face-to-face meetings. But the pandemic and the self-isolation regime demanded a complete restructuring of the business processes: now my courses can only take place in the online format (zoom). On the one hand, it simplified the work of our managers: no need to look for a classroom, rent it, arrange it, prepare for classes, print and lay out materials, organise a coffee break... and so on. I no longer need localization managers and reception administrators who register people and help them learn. That is, I save money. On the other hand, data traffic has increased dramatically, at times, I mean the educational material that has to be broadcast from the teacher and the methodologist to the students – an online speech, video materials, podcasts, video and audio lessons…

In addition, in the conditions of the lockdown, we had to abandon the physical office: my employees switched to remote operation mode. And thus, our unified database – materials, archive, financial documentation, databases of participants, teachers, video materials and text presentations of lessons, related educational materials stored in the local network for general well-coordinated work, turned out to be ... in the cloud! After all, you understand that only a virtual local network was the way out to continue working in the conditions that have developed since last year!

The next step for us was a gradual transition to the cloud. Thanks to the services of cloud engineers from Eremenko & Polomani, this transition was quick and it allowed us:

• do not lose valuable terabytes of necessary and useful business and educational information, which you will agree is important!
• it is correct and convenient for use to reorganize, segment and distribute data by sections, departments and specific accesses for certain employees;
• filter out the necessary and already unnecessary data;
• it's not strange that now we save on wires, physical servers, for which we lost the office floor and rent! The main thing is that we now do not need a physical system administrator serving the network and hardware, whose salary was more than the salary of all methodologists combined;
• as a result, to reorganize and optimize, significantly simplify the entire educational process

What recommendations would I give to all colleagues who are thinking about switching to the cloud?

1. Clearly understand all the costly moments – the cloud migration will require efforts from you and your employees, human and material resources will be involved, which will pay off in the end.
2. The principles of your work will change in the future after the transition, working with information will become different – you will have to retrain yourself a little and retrain the staff to work with data, but it's not difficult and, as they say, it's a matter of habit.
3. Keep in mind that not all businesses need cloud migration right now. For some, this is a matter of the future.
4. Be prepared for the difficulties of transition and adaptation!
5. Choose the cloud consultancy and cloud solution provider carefully!