After Deutsche Bank has showcased their successful Drive to the Cloud on the Knowledge-19, the interest towards cloud movement has been increased. More and more ServiceNow customers hosting their instances locally are following this trend. That's fully understandable: cloud migration helps to reduce costs, gain more scalability, improve performance and enable such useful benefits as AI or security benchmarks.
Once me and my team migrated an on-premise instance to the cloud, I decided to summarize our experience and share it with you in the form of tips and best practices. This will be a series of articles where the part 1 will cover planning aspects, the part 2 will be dedicated to security assessment and the part 3 will be focused mainly on a solution design.
Define clear project governance. Establish workstreams, project committees, escalation flow. Schedule regular status meetings at all levels. Define a crisis management team. A clearly defined structure will support you throughout the whole project lifecycle.
Develop an effective communication plan. Nothing is more important to the success than effective communication. Make sure you involve all relevant parties such as management, users, service desk, product owners, project teams, interface partners, infrastructure teams, etc. Collect contact details of all key players within your migration. If you design banners or splash screens, align their content with corporate branding standards.
Establish a group of users who can test your solution. This group should be not limited to QA teams only, but may also include users, product owners, infrastructure teams, interface partners and others. The more parties are involved into testing, then faster you detect and eliminate gaps in your solution.
Engage with infrastructure teams. When executing such a major change as cloud migration, you will have not only explicit, but also implicit dependencies which may significantly impact project results. To identify them early and mitigate corresponding risks, engage with your infrastructure colleagues such as AD, Networks, SSO or Exchange.
Engage with ServiceNow. Identify areas where you require support of ServiceNow architects, system administrators or security analysts and involve them as early as possible. They will help you define compatibility issues, security constrains and other important technical aspects.
Consider development cycles, deployment freezes, platform upgrades and patching. It's essential to align your plan with DevOps teams to avoid unpredicted changes or data loss. Thinking of patching, don't forget about mandatory patching time frames. For more details refer to the ServiceNow Patching Program FAQ.
Request hardware in advance. If your solution relies on additional hardware such as MID servers, firewalls or load balancers, do not hesitate to order them in advance. Otherwise you may face unnecessary delays in the timeline when approval or provisioning of hardware suddenly becomes a bottle neck.
Consider security requirements. Make sure that your solution complies with corporate security and legal standards. Since security assessment is a big part of every cloud migration, it will be covered in detail in the next article.
Define a rollback plan. Even if your solution looks perfect and you have obtained all necessary signoffs, there can be always surprises. This means you should have a reliable rollback plan.
Hopefully these tips will contribute to your success while migrating ServiceNow to the cloud. In the next part I will cover key aspects of the security assessment.
