Cloud migration has become a necessity for enterprises to survive in today’s business environment that demands digital transformation. Yet, many of them fail to effectively migrate their transformation process to the cloud. They need to be aware of the obstacles in the way and build strategies to effectively address them.
Organizations are increasingly moving to the cloud as a result of remote work and the immense benefits they foresee in the long-term future. But, despite enhanced software solutions and advanced knowledge, many still fail to achieve their expected ROI from cloud migration.
According to a 2019 report from Cloud Security Alliance, 90% of CIOs experienced failed or disrupted data migration projects, due to the complexity involved in moving from on-premises to the cloud environment. Only 25% involved in the study were able to meet their cloud migration deadlines with the average project taking 12 months to complete.
Also Read: 3 Most Significant Threats to Cloud Migration Planning
In fact, Virtana’s State of Hybrid Cloud: February 2021 report revealed 72% of IT decision-makers have moved from cloud to on-premise. It showcases the inability of organizations to understand and leverage the full potential of the cloud migration process. But, why do cloud migrations fail?
If it is not planned correctly, migrating applications to the cloud can become costly and disruptive. It also gives rise to performance degradation, work interruption, security gaps as well as draining IT and business resources. Furthermore, only building the cloud to meet the present needs and not thinking about its impact on the future can hamper the business in the long run.
Issues related to cybersecurity and governance policies often remain undetected until a particular vulnerability is revealed, which is often too late. Hence, IT leaders should opt for the less costly and time-consuming process to design and implement cloud environments in advance, rather than investing time and resources to fix the mistakes later on.
Poor communication and unclear, poorly defined goals can often lead to migration failure. Therefore, it is important that IT leaders create a clear migration communication strategy to ensure complete alignment across the verticals within the organization. By taking inputs from all the stakeholders into account, IT leaders should develop strategies to align everyone’s views and prevent any friction.
Since execution of tasks takes place in the same order for each server in the enterprise migration, even a small inefficiency in the process can massively delay and inflate the costs.
Many organizations do not have an updated configuration management database (CMDB) in place. Many organizations end up having long and tedious interview processes with vendors that are rarely accurate. The less accurate the infrastructure analysis, the more likely it will break application connections in the cloud migration process. This exposes the organization to availability and performance issues and increased security threats.
Also Read: Enterprises Need to rethink their Approach towards Cloud Migration Process
To avoid various pitfalls such as above and achieve the cloud transformation objective, enterprises should develop and operationalize a comprehensive migration strategy that aligns business decision-makers, generates buy-in across the organization and manages previous incidents.
The migration blueprint should include a migration strategy for every application; from defining the changes that will be made to them to migrating each application to the cloud. Failure to properly manage plans can lead to slowing down the migration process, missing dependencies and causing outages.
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Vishal Muktewar is a Senior Correspondent at On Dot Media. He reports news that focuses on the latest trends and innovations happening in the B2B industry. An IT engineer by profession, Vishal has worked at Insights Success before joining Ondot. His love for stories has driven him to take up a career in enterprise journalism. He effectively uses his knowledge of technology and flair for writing, for crafting features, articles and interactions for technology enterprise media platforms.
