If you’re viewing cloud-based Intelligent Automation as an increasingly attractive option, you’re not alone. Deloitte found that a third of organizations it surveyed (31%) had accelerated their investment in cloud‑hosted IA in response to the COVID‑19 pandemic. Only one in ten (11%) weren’t using cloud infrastructure for their automation solutions, and almost half were already using it for some of their automations.
Although Cloud migration demands time and effort, it’s easier than you might think. Migration to the cloud works best when divided into small projects. For each sprint, Blue Prism breaks the migration approach into three critical steps, let’s learn them.
- Preparation
In preparation for migration, Blue Prism and its customer together connect and integrate the cloud platform into the customer environment and set up the environment for migration, installing applications and configuring digital worker identities.
It’s important to lay the groundwork by having a clear agreement on which applications are going to be in which process. Also, prepare pre-built application configurations so that your IT team can push those deployments straight to the digital workers.
In the enthusiasm to migrate to the cloud, it’s vital not to rush and bypass best practices. If you fail to build resilience into automation, you’ll struggle later when you want to expand your use of Intelligent Automation. These are good reasons for building a robust platform from the start.
- Pre-production and testing
When an IA process is ready, development is frozen at the pre-production stage so that we can test the process. At this stage, Blue Prism exports from the old system and import it into the non-production environment on the cloud. This allows the vendor to test the actual process, looking for things like application response-time variations.
It’s important to be clear about what a successful test looks like. The test must replicate what the process does today, with no additions or changes. Once processes are migrated to the cloud successfully, you’ll have a chance to revisit some of those processes to make them better, faster and stronger, tapping into cloud features that may not have been available in your on-premise environment.
- Going live
After testing has been completed successfully, a migration team is ready to move the process into production. The existing on-premise and new cloud platforms will run in parallel for an agreed-upon time and are designed as part of the migration plan. This allows you to migrate in a controlled manner. Then it’s a “go, no go” decision to run the process live on the cloud.
