“Migrating more workloads to the cloud” ranks as the second most important cloud initiative for organizations, according to Statista.
84% of organizations are actively looking for ways to shrink cloud migration times, according to research by Enterprise Strategy Group by TechTarget for VMware.
If your company is among those planning to transition multiple systems to the cloud, you may now be evaluating managed file transfer (MFT) solutions as part of your cloud strategy.
However, once you’ve chosen a cloud MFT solution, what comes next? How do you ensure a smooth and successful migration? How can you reduce the time both old and new file transfer systems operate in parallel? And how can you simplify the transition for your users and customers?
At Thru, we specialize in software-as-a-service (SaaS) MFT solutions; therefore, we manage migration and deployment of our file transfer service for our customers. The following steps provide an overview of our process to give you a clear understanding of what a successful cloud MFT migration entails.
1. Defining Roles & Responsibilities
No matter the size of the migration, the first step is assembling the right team !At Thru, we rely on a dual-lead migration team:
- Migration Lead: Representative from customer’s organization who is responsible for communicating expectations and plans to its organization.
- Thru Representative: Provides guidance and shares best practices.
When building your migration team, consider the following:
- Has anyone on the IT team previously participated in a successful migration?
- Among those individuals, who possesses the most technical expertise?
- Who on the IT team is respected and well-regarded across various departments? This person can effectively communicate migration timelines and address questions or concerns.
2. Auditing
What’s the first step when reorganizing a closet? You take everything out to assess what you have.
Migration works the same way—you need a clear understanding of your current setup before making it more efficient. Start by asking:
- Where are the current file transfer systems? Who can access them?
- What endpoints are we and our partners using?
- Who is using/relies on these file transfer systems?
Depending on how much information your IT team has already documented, auditing may take a few weeks.
3. Project Assessment & Scoping
Now that all the information is consolidated, the migration team can begin identifying patterns and organizing the workflows into categories. When Thru assists customers with migration, we typically categorize the workflows according to their endpoints (by server/client and protocol type).
For example, a customer might discover that its partners use 50 SFTP servers, 20 FTPS clients and 10 SFTP clients. Based on this insight, they can establish distinct phases for the migration.
Once all categories are defined, the next step is to assess the impact of migrating each category of endpoints and evaluate the resources required to perform each phase. This process culminates in a detailed project plan for each category migration.
4. Collecting Information about Workflows
Due to the level of detail involved, this step is the most challenging part of the migration process.
Working closely with the customer, the team now gathers the following detailed information for each previously identified workflow:
- Host
- User
- Password
- Path
- Schedule
- Type
- Protocol
- Certificate
- SSL key
- Encryption
- Compression
- Rename
5. Making Flows
How this step is executed is specific to each cloud MFT solution.
In Thru’s automated file transfer (AFT) product, the user creates a Thru flow for each workflow by submitting the information collected in the previous step above. Flows can be created manually in Thru or imported using our Migration Utility Program (MUP). The MUP allows you to upload file flow data from an MS Excel spreadsheet (.csv file) directly into Thru, converting the data into flows.
6. Testing
Using sample files, test each flow, ensuring all endpoints are successfully receiving files.
7. Deployment
After all tests are successfully completed, the cloud MFT solution is ready for use. However, deployment is not the finish line—it’s just the starting point. Ongoing support for both internal and external users is essential to ensure full adoption of the cloud MFT solution.
Migrating to Cloud MFT with Thru
Thru is a cloud-native managed file transfer service. Migrating your scheduled file transfer interfaces from a legacy system to the cloud can be a complex and time-intensive process. However, to help you plan for success, we have prepared a document that offers a general framework to guide your migration:
Read the complete Thru MFT Migration Playbook »
If you’re interested in migrating MFT to the cloud, read more about cloud MFT deployment options »
