These days, more and more organizations are thinking about moving their infrastructure to the cloud. Cloud migration allows businesses to increase their flexibility, optimize costs or boost the pace of development, which impacts not only the IT team but the entire organization. However, it’s important to be completely sure you’re moving your data and applications securely and cost-effectively without interrupting the end-user experience.
In this article, we will discover the most common challenges of cloud migration.
Where to Start Your Cloud Migration?
Cloud migration is the process of moving digital assets, such as data, workloads, IT resources, or applications, to a cloud infrastructure. It usually means moving tools and data from old, legacy infrastructure or an on-premises data center provided by a cloud service vendor such as Microsoft Azure or Google Cloud.
Cloud migration is increasingly happening within the cloud, as companies migrate between different cloud service providers (known as cloud-to-cloud migration). For most organizations, cloud migration is the highest priority on the IT transformation checklist. Of course, there can be various reasons supporting the migration, with some of the most important being cost management, innovation (new analytics, machine learning, artificial intelligence), IT agility, assurance and reliability, simple infrastructure management, data warehouse shrinkage, and performance improvements.
However, migrating a data warehouse from one platform to another is not an easy task. So where should companies start? It is extremely critical to know exactly what your company’s IT ecosystem involves, understand which applications should be migrated first, and be aware of all the risks associated with this process.
Organizations should always start the cloud migration process with an assessment of their current IT infrastructure, which helps identify all risks, complexities, key performance indicators, integration, performance, query fulfillment, etc. It also enables organizations to develop a holistic perspective of their data center assets and IT ecosystems.
The Most Common Challenges of Cloud Migration
Migration can be complex and sometimes even risky in the absence of specialized preparation. Here are some of the main challenges that many organizations face when migrating and moving resources.
Resistance to implementing a cloud solution
The first common challenge during migration could be your own employees’ resistance to change. Cloud migration brings a lot of transformation, and even disruption, often involving the appearance of significantly new systems, processes, and even new leadership.
Lack of strategy
Many organizations start migrating to the cloud without devoting enough time and attention to developing a strategy. A successful implementation requires careful planning of the end-to-end migration to the cloud, as each application and data set may have different requirements and considerations, and may need a different approach to cloud migration. Any organization should have a clear business case for each workload that is moved to the cloud.
Organizations should focus on creating a change management plan that clearly defines a comprehensive migration strategy, any possible migration challenges, the resources needed to support the migration process, and methods to verify whether the migration was conducted successfully.
Cost management
When moving to the cloud, many organizations make the same mistakes and fail to establish clear KPIs to understand what they are going to spend and any savings that the move is supposed to bring about. This makes it difficult to establish whether the migration was successful from an economic point of view. In addition, cloud environments are dynamic and costs can change quickly, as new services are adopted and the number of applications in use grows.
Downtime
When moving large amounts of data to the cloud, one of the biggest risks is network outages. If data is not backed up properly, failures can lead to permanent data loss. A potential workaround is to create a backup IT environment where you can host and run applications until the migration is complete. Note that temporary servers often cannot cope with peak loads. In such situations, it is best to manage user workloads and/or inform users in advance about limited capabilities and periodic unavailability of applications.
Security and privacy
When you start migrating data from physical servers, that’s when your company is at its most vulnerable. You need to pay close attention to network security and potential vulnerabilities before starting the migration process.
Compatibility and adaptability
Not all applications that need to be moved to the cloud may be compatible with the cloud environment. Some applications work better in a private or hybrid cloud than in a public cloud, while other applications require minor customization, and still, others may require extensive recoding. If you are doing a step-by-step migration, be sure to identify and resolve compatibility issues between on-premises systems and cloud services.
Adaptability in migration refers to the ability of an organization to collaborate and improve efficiency through new systems and policies. Companies that are not able to adapt often face problems migrating to the cloud. During migration, business processes should be prepared to work with the new architecture.
Conclusion
Just as your business is unique, your transition to the cloud is unique. Adapting your cloud migration plan to your needs should be a key step of the process. Moving your data and applications securely and without interrupting your business processes should be a priority.
