The statistics G2 published about the cloud are impressive, the cloud reduces downtime by about 57%, improves the average time to market for new features by 37%, and improves application development and maintenance productivity by 38%.
But to reap all those benefits, you need to set up your cloud environment effectively and migrate well. In this article, we explore common challenges and how you can overcome them to maximize the advantages of cloud adoption.
Where Cloud Migrations Go Wrong
Migrating from on-premise to the cloud needs to be strategic and focused on your business’s goals to ensure an efficient, effective, and high-performing cloud environment. Here we have 6 areas with 10 specific challenges:
Strategic Challenges
- Having a Clear Migration Plan: If your team doesn't agree on a plan to proceed with the migration, it could easily become confused and unclear as to who is doing what and when. The whole migration team needs to agree on why the migration is important, the priority, and the migration strategy that will be deployed.
Clear, open, transparent communication helps everyone get on the same page. Leadership needs to be open about why this migration matters, and everyone should be involved with planning and agreeing on processes.
Technical Challenges
- Complex Current Infrastructure: The more complex your current infrastructure is, the more interdependencies it will have. It may also be incompatible with modern cloud systems if it is outdated.
It’s important to take a step back and analyze your infrastructure before starting your migration to solve this issue. So, you should map out all interdependencies in your infrastructure and identify compatibility issues. These two factors should form the basis of your migration plan. They’ll help you to decide the phases and what applications need to be migrated together.
- Performance Post Migration: A common issue companies face when migrating to the cloud is that application performance doesn’t improve markedly. To ensure high performance in the cloud, your new cloud environment needs to be set up to maximize performance and reduce costs.
To prevent this from happening to you, you need to deploy the correct migration strategy and set up your cloud environment correctly. Following best practices, understanding your chosen platform’s logic, or working with an experienced migration partner can help.
Security Challenges
- Data Security: Migrating your applications to the cloud can expose your business to data leakages, breaches, or cyber attacks. If your API isn't secure, sending data to the cloud poses another risk.
Encrypting all data at rest and in transit protects it from possible attacks. You should also check that your API is encrypted and authenticated and has the correct validation techniques.
- Data Compliance: Data compliance laws have become stricter worldwide, with GDPR, CCPA, and PIPEDA aiming to protect their citizens’ data.
While many cloud platforms already have built-in data compliance options, it is important to confirm before migrating. You should also check that you are correctly implementing any necessary compliance tools or checks.
Operational Challenges
- Data backup and recovery: Before beginning your migration, all data must be fully backed up in case of any issues. You must test that backup before starting to be sure it can be recovered. Data can be altered or corrupted during migration, or your application could go down, so testing backup and recovery is key.
In addition to testing and scheduling regular backups, you should conduct data validation and integrity checks throughout your migration to verify data completeness and maintain logs of all processed data.
- Skill and time to perform the migration: While many professionals are cloud experts, migrating to the cloud requires a dedicated task force to check and double-check all pathways before migrating. It also requires a certain understanding of the cloud, infrastructure, and migration techniques, which your team may not have.
If you’re concerned with your team’s cloud knowledge or lack of time to dedicate to such an important and delicate project, you should work with cloud consultants. Search for a migration provider with knowledge of your chosen cloud provider to discuss your needs and goals.
Financial Implications
- Unclear Costs: When starting your migration, team leaders and stakeholders must follow your budget for the migration and cloud costs post-migration. It’s important to consider costs at each stage of the project:
These can include on-premises data management, the full migration project, application changes, and your cloud license, among other costs.
Ensure you have analyzed the full costs and have a fixed budget for migration costs. A migration provider can help you calculate the cost.
- High Costs: Often, companies expect their costs to reduce drastically after migration. In reality, if you don’t have visibility into your resources and how they’re being used, they can increase quickly, leading to very high costs.
Setting up tools to understand your performance and resourcing will help. Your cloud environment needs to be set up to use resources efficiently and track all resource usage. Optimizing costs and having visibility into your spending is essential to functioning in a streamlined fashion in the cloud.
Change Management
- Team Training: Finally, team management needs to understand their team’s understanding of cloud computing and the cloud platform chosen. Each member of the development, infrastructure, and finance team should receive training. Working in the cloud means adjusting to new processes and technologies. Based on your team’s knowledge, you can decide the correct courses, training, and certifications to recommend.
Avoid Costly Cloud Migration Mistakes. Get Expert Guidance from StratusGrid
StratusGrid is a cloud migration expert with over ten years of experience. To provide our customers with the best, most efficient, and most optimized migration, we created MigrateOne with Relutech, Xosphere, and ProsperOps. Our partnership repurchases your on-premises data centers, reduces cloud expenses, implements strategies to increase savings, and creates and implements a roadmap for migration.
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