Needed to migrate a on-premises environment to the cloud. Never tried it before, but I felt my knowledge about how Active Directory functions played a big part in me being able to complete this task for this company. I tried my best to keep the costs down as I know cloud costs can balloon to a ridiculous amount of money. There were definitely things I could’ve done better. If only I had more time!! 😅However, just like all projects, I had to finish it in within the time constraints that was given to me. Pretty glad how it turned out.
Now do I prefer on-premises over cloud? In some ways yes. Having the freedom and flexibility to allocate more resources to a struggling VM is just so much easier on on-premises. Just getting approvals to upgrade a VM is just painful sometimes in the corporate world.
I will say cloud has its benefits as well. They made the migration path pretty simple. Whether you’re moving to AWS or Azure, the documentation they provide is fantastic. I personally went with the Azure Migrate route, but there are many ways to move to the cloud depending on the complexity of your environment. Also, if you have an electrical outage, because of a pissed off Articuno or “Bomb Cyclones”, your servers will be safe in the cloud. Unless they go down, but that’s the worst-case scenario.
Things I could’ve improved on:
- Lay out concrete plans on what to do with the file servers. Whether it’s blob storage, a VM, Sharepoint, or Azure Files. Just make sure there is a plan in place and a plan b, c, d, etc
- I should’ve created a detailed email or document to show the users how to access the new cloud servers.
- Make sure printers are not set statically at the corporate office. If you’re moving networks or changing DHCP servers at the on-premises office, having the printers be static will become very annoying to fix later. (Printers…🤬)
At the end of the day, this company can safely just shut off their on-premises servers and still have their functioning “Corporate” office elsewhere.
