5 Cloud Migration Mistakes to Avoid

Cloud Migration Mistakes

According to a recent survey by IDC, half of 6159 executives define their cloud strategies as “ad hoc.”

Many company executives have stop-gap cloud strategies managing cloud migration on their own. However most such initiatives run into problems and executives face many challenges in migrating to cloud, arising out of some common mistakes. Many businesses go about without any specific cloud migration strategies but a thorough process evaluation and goal setting can help avoid some common and costly mistakes such as these five.

1- No Cloud Strategy is formed

It is one of the common mistakes that businesses commit. Migrating to the cloud has rich benefactors to it, but it can only be helpful if the objectives and goals of using it are defined. Cloud benefits for different businesses varies a-lot. Cost reduction can act beneficial for business regarding data control and a future cost increase for unplanned cloud resource allocation.

Determining a goal and accessing how cloud migration can accomplish with a “Cloud migration strategy” is step one. Business Agility holds different meanings for different businesses. Cloud Migration is a lengthy and a complicated process depending on the internal resources, the cloud provider, migration team and host of other factors. Accord-IT specialised in going through all the details of systems, processes for define a beneficial cloud migration strategy for client.

2- uncertainty – What should move to cloud

It is very simple to find the perfect candidate for cloud migration for small businesses (less than 50-100 VMs/workloads), but when it comes to an enterprise space, where we are talking about hundreds and thousands of workloads, then assessment becomes a key component.

Understanding workloads, applications and databases is a vital component for simplifying the process. One must know what workloads are being used, when and how are they being used, what application is interacting with other application, when is it happening, and which databases can be relied on. A clear understanding of all these aspects can simplify the process and streamline it.

3- Choosing a Wrong Cloud Platform

Whether it be public, private or hybrid cloud platforms, they have their own unique features, benefits and challenges to them. Some can benefit you in some way while the other might not be useful for you. A public cloud can solve a different set of problems that a private cloud might not be able to, while a hybrid cloud can benefit you in many ways.

Hybrid Cloud (mix of public and private cloud) also has benefits, challenges and variations that must be considered. Infrastructure as a Services (IaaS), Platform as a Service (PaaS) and Software as a Service (SaaS) are vast choices and have different benefits and challenges to them.

A wrong choice can result in major costs, a slowdown in business processes, loss of access to applications, inability to compete in the market and other such challenges that can hamper the growth and agility of business. The important considerations in a cloud platform choice are cloud services, cloud maturity, its performance, costs and competencies of the provider. Need for a perfect match of all these is what one is looking for.

4- Unaware about the Process of Migration

Understanding the migration process based on the platform and chosen provider is very important. Without a proper understanding of application mapping shifting an application to the cloud can turn out to be your biggest mistake. You need to understand the process of migration completely before initiating the process of migration. Not every application can be simply shifted to the cloud (re-hosting), as some of them might need a significant amount of re-architecture (refactoring) in them.

This is a major mistake that usually businesses make, as they are not aware what to re-host or refactor and when to do it. This process requires specialised skills and can take up a large amount of time of your IT team if done manually. DevOps Certification is one way in which you can cut down some extra time for your team to work towards growth rather than study in depth about the concept of cloud computing. An incomplete knowledge about the concept of cloud computing can make us fall prey to its various problems. Trying to optimise a workload after it has been moved to the cloud is one of the other mistakes that come from the lack of migration process knowledge. Evolving of an application after it has been migrated is necessary but can be very costly and error-prone when done manually without automated optimisation tools.

The nature of the initial process of migration puts many organisations and teams into learning that can lead to errors and miscalculations. Having a support partner or a partner to assist in providing automation platform can ensure that no details are missed while avoiding various potential errors as well.

5- Overlooking the Need for Security and Compliance

A lack of knowledge about the migration process leads to lack of understanding the need for data protection, how to do it and also the lack of knowledge of protection of data.

Many companies think that their data is protected automatically, which is not true. It is your responsibility to ensure your data is protected and secure by encrypting it. A lack of knowledge of the process, not understanding the offerings of cloud providers, needed resources and platform choices, all these details are very vital and should be not be underestimated by various businesses.

The difference between manual and automated cloud migration can be profound. With the latest cloud migration automation tools and services, the complexity and much of the costs and uncertainty of the migration process can be removed. However, businesses must understand the ins and outs of cloud migration and have clear objectives to ensure their success.