You’ve decided it’s time to capitalize on the many advantages of using a colocation server hosting facility. As you prepare to act on that decision, the reality of the challenges you’ll face in making the move hits you. Now you begin to think about how to ensure that your migration takes place without incident. While it’s true that there are risks associated with making the switchover, there are steps you can take to help guarantee a seamless transition.
Preparing for Your Colocation Server Hosting Move
You’re eager to move your processing to your new colocation server hosting facility. But, it’s critical that you do so without interrupting business operations. Here are six things you can do to help ensure success:
- Create a detailed migration plan. Put every step of your transition process in writing. This is critical to achieving your goals. Create a plan that has a step-by-step description of the process with specific times (i.e. “Saturday 8:00 a.m.” versus “Saturday morning”) and assignments. This will provide clarity and instill confidence in everyone involved. Develop this plan based on available bandwidth and be sure that someone is assigned the task of ensuring that all necessary software licenses have been obtained.
- Choose a migration manager. Your transition will be a group effort. However, be sure to name one person to ride herd over the entire process. Without someone in that role, it’s too easy to assume that someone else is going to take care of a task that was left unassigned or handle an issue that has come up.
- Practice to the extent possible. While not every aspect of the move can be tested in advance, many things can be. Do whatever “dry runs” you can, and repeat them if necessary to ensure that on move day, everyone is comfortable with their assigned tasks. This can prevent a situation where you discover in the middle of a move that some task wasn’t accounted for or someone is unclear about what they should be doing.
- Back everything up. While your preparation and testing will almost certainly guarantee a smooth transition, those are, of course, famous last words! Better safe than sorry. Be sure to create all necessary data backups, restore points, and image archives just in case. And by this, we mean every last byte of data should be backed up.
- Be well-staffed. Having just enough personnel available to handle all the transition tasks is really not enough. If problems arise and people are pulled away to handle them, you can easily find yourself short-staffed. Hope for the best, and plan for… something short of that!
- Run in tandem if possible. If the early indicators are that the transition was successful, it probably was. However, running in tandem for a period of days or weeks can be very reassuring to your organization. It can also be a lifesaver if a significant issue is encountered.
Helping You Make a Risk-Mitigated Data Center Move
When you’re ready to transition to colocation server hosting, we’ve got the cutting-edge facility you need. And we can share our insights on how to make a stress-free transition. Complete our website Contact Us form, stop by our facility, or call us at 800-935-6527 and let’s talk about your objectives.
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