Moving to the cloud offers businesses several potential benefits. Cloud services can help organizations become more efficient, reduce costs, and easily scale when they need additional resources. Moving to the cloud can also improve data security and remove the burden of maintaining your own IT infrastructure. However, companies make common mistakes when moving their data to the cloud. This article will look at some of the most common cloud migration challenges and how you can avoid them.
Companies often overlook the importance of a solid strategy for migrating their applications, data, and resources to the cloud. Successful cloud adoption and implementation require rigorous end-to-end cloud migration planning. In addition, each application and dataset may have different requirements and considerations and require a different cloud migration approach. As a result, there is no one-size-fits-all approach.
In addition, before you begin any migration project, you must ensure you understand the end goal. What are you trying to accomplish with the migration? How will you measure the success of the project? Are there any specific KPIs you want to improve due to the move to the cloud? What will the new system look like? What functionality do you need? What are your long-term plans? Before exploring potential migration paths, you need to understand these things.
Moving to the cloud is a significant project for any organization. When it comes to migration success, people often pose the most significant challenge as they tend to resist change. And a cloud migration brings a lot of change and disruption—often with new systems, processes, and even leadership. You will struggle to execute a successful migration if your team is left in the dark. Managing the project as a single, integrated effort, with the necessary communication and collaboration between stakeholders is essential. Businesses should involve all stakeholder groups at the appropriate stages of the project and ensure that all groups have the information necessary to make informed decisions.
A lift and shift strategy moves data and applications from the physical infrastructure directly to the cloud without data optimization. Some IT administrators do this because this speeds up the data migration process. However, this leads to reduced efficiency of cloud processes. Eventually, the IT administrators will have to optimize the data and applications for the cloud.
Rather than lift and shift, cloud-native optimization of the data and applications should be done before the migration. This means that the data and applications should be configured to take advantage of the unique features of the cloud. The applications should not be hard-wired to any physical infrastructure for easy scalability and should be packaged to be easily reused.
Establishing clear, actionable priorities is one of the secrets to successful cloud adoption and the best way to ensure zero downtime. When planning a move to the cloud, IT managers must review the entire application stack, as well as the supporting IT processes and operations, so they can identify and prioritize the workloads that may be a close fit for the cloud and which ones may require considerable refactoring before migration.
Another significant cloud migration challenge is selecting the wrong services or partners for your cloud migration is a recipe for disaster. You want to ensure that you do proper due diligence to minimize the risk of error and maximize the potential benefits of the migration. Make sure that you do a thorough assessment of all potential partners. Some things to check when choosing include:
Vendor lock-in occurs when organizations are dependent on a single cloud provider and cannot quickly move to another vendor in the future without substantial costs, legal constraints, or technical challenges. Several circumstances can negatively impact a business if vendor lock-in occurs, including:
There are several factors that an organization should consider to mitigate cloud vendor lock-in, including designing loosely coupled and portable applications, developing a multi-cloud strategy, planning early for an exit and performing due diligence.
Data security concerns and compliance risks remain significant barriers to cloud adoption. Because of its decentralized nature, a person could gain access to an organization’s resources in several ways. Therefore, it is imperative to adopt a zero trust security approach and establish robust security at every layer of an organization’s cloud presence, trusting no one and no device. Opting for managed security services can help reduce such security risks and ensure regulatory compliance is consistently met.
The cloud offers businesses several potential benefits, but it can be challenging to navigate. Therefore, before you start your cloud migration, it is essential to understand the potential pitfalls and build a comprehensive plan to address them. Leveraging the support of a managed cloud service provider can assist you in implementing an efficient cloud migration, minimizing disruption to your operations and cloud security risks.
