First, establish your organisation’s reason and expected ROIs for why you are moving to the cloud. Like all projects, moving to the cloud requires clear goals, objectives, project leads, and partners.

By doing a performance analysis of your current on-prem infrastructure, you can evaluate the different options available to help future project performance, establishing impact against existing risks and total cost of operation. A comprehensive assessment will help you identify which cloud option best meets your business needs at the lowest cost.

Third-party software vendor support is important to consider because many critical business applications have strict requirements around the infrastructure they support. Therefore, it is vital to determine the cloud readiness of each application and the potential impact on licensing.

Cloud service providers offer different deployment models including public, private, hybrid, and hosted. Each model has different levels of flexibility, control, and price points. Understanding the differences between each model can help you determine which one is best for your unique business challenges.

A thorough understanding of the SLA is crucial, as it outlines the performance level you can expect. Make sure any SLA is crystal clear on the issue resolution process and expected timeframes, and guarantees a quick response time so your systems stay up and running.

It is important that you review the minimum operating system requirements and ensure your OS is in alignment with IBM’s “end of life” schedule. Any partner you work with should have a thorough understanding of the IBM iSeries support lifecycle and guarantee that your OS is properly supported in the cloud.

Make sure you are clear on your partner’s backup and recovery strategy to ensure the IBM disaster recovery solutions meet your RTO and RPO needs. Your partner should map your defined RTO and RPO requirements to your SLA, to ensure they are met.

Many ERP software providers’ licensing does not fit the cloud model. Meaning a detailed review of the ERP’s licensing clause is required. Keep an eye out for incremental charges and make sure the licensing allows you to run a production or target instance in the cloud. Confirm that your cloud partner will facilitate a proactive discussion with your ERP provider if any questions/concerns or additional costs are uncovered.

In most cases, cloud computing is MORE secure than an on-prem solution. Meridian IT has multiple highly-trained security specialists to securely manage your transition using the most up to date security software. This will ensure that your industry standard regulations remain traceable under audit against the specific controls and data protections required.

Maintain control of your data and operations by having a clearly defined exit strategy. Your partner should work with you to provide a documented process to gain a complete copy of your data. Along with a plan to migrate all applications to a separate system. Agreements should take into consideration your short-term and long-term business needs which may impact the length of the term, along with the general terms and conditions.