Enterprises must develop and implement a thorough migration plan that aligns business drivers, fosters organizational buy-in, and handles past incidents to achieve true cloud transformation.
Cloud migration is necessary for the majority of businesses. Nevertheless, despite advanced software tooling and lessons learned, enterprises frequently struggle to define or realize their anticipated ROI from cloud migration.
As businesses move more of their workloads to public clouds and pursue multi-cloud strategies to achieve lower costs, increased agility, and greater flexibility, cloud computing for enterprise apps keeps expanding. However, not every cloud deployment offers them any benefits at all.
As the result of moving apps into the cloud only to discover that they don’t perform as well as they did on-premises, which forces a reverse migration, many IT leaders face failed cloud migration projects.
Cloud infrastructure has been almost universally adopted because it gives access to business-critical infrastructure and eliminates the hassle of hosting on-site. It does, however, carry some risks. The most frequent problems that businesses encounter when moving to the cloud are given below:
One of the most significant risks is the transition to the cloud without a clear, comprehensive cloud migration strategy. An organization must decide on several crucial issues before moving to the cloud, including:
Distribution of IT assets: Depending on the data and application, on-premises hosting or private or public clouds are preferable. Most businesses decide on a hybrid cloud model, dividing their assets between local infrastructure and private and public clouds. A cloud migration strategy should include a breakdown of the assets hosted in each environment.
Also Read: Four Reasons Why Cloud Migrations Could Fail
Useful Cloud Platforms: There are many cloud providers, and each one provides a wide range of tailored options and is ideal for various uses. An organization should decide which platform(s) best fits its use cases before moving to the cloud.
Application Deployment Model: The cloud offers fresh alternatives for application deployment, like serverless programs and containers. An organization must choose whether it will “lift and shift” applications created for on-prem environments to the cloud or re-architect applications to fully benefit from the cloud when preparing to migrate to it.
The cost, time, and complexity of a cloud migration process can all be increased by delaying these and other crucial decisions. Additionally, making the wrong choices, like storing or processing sensitive data in a public cloud environment, can pose serious security risks.
Complex architectures are feasible in an on-premises setting. An organization can support a broad range of databases and applications thanks to the relatively low intra-site network latency, which has little to no effect on performance.
A complicated existing infrastructure can make migrating to the cloud difficult. Among the possible effects are the following:
Extended Migration Process: If the on-premises architecture of an organization is complicated, creating and implementing a migration strategy will be difficult. Organizations must plan to move their IT assets to the cloud without compromising security or performance.
Reduced Performance: When an organization’s infrastructure is split between multiple cloud environments and on premise architecture, latency is significantly higher than in an on premise environment. Therefore, complex architectures with much interconnectivity between assets hosted in various places will perform worse when moving to the cloud.
Serverless applications are one of the new architectural options provided by cloud infrastructure. Cloud migration offers the chance to redesign and re-architect an organization’s complex infrastructure if it has a complex architecture.
Offerings from various CSPs have varying features and advantages. For instance, companies looking for a general-purpose cloud may opt for AWS, while companies using LDAP and Active Directory may profit from Azure’s built-in integration with these systems.
An organization can choose the “right” cloud depending on its use cases. An organization may not be able to fully benefit from its cloud migration if it selects a CSP that is not compatible with its intended uses. It may also experience significant performance problems or a complex migration while attempting to implement its necessary functionality in a less-than-ideal setting. Moving from one CSP to another to address these problems can incur extra costs and overhead.
When preparing for cloud migration, a company should thoroughly investigate the options and ensure the cloud provider they choose implements the functionality they need and can support any required third-party solutions. A multi-cloud infrastructure is widespread among businesses because it offers the best conditions for various resources and use cases.
In an on-premises environment, the IT environments of many organizations have developed over time. Adapting infrastructure and applications for on premise deployment to a cloud environment is difficult.
As a result, as an organization works to re-architect systems and applications for cloud environments, the cloud migration process may be prolonged. Cloud migration can typically take a year or longer.
Losses in Productivity: As businesses go through the cloud migration process, their IT infrastructure will go through transitional states. Some resources are moved to the cloud while others are waiting their turn. Since these intermediate states are unlikely to be optimized, an organization may experience significant performance and productivity losses that could harm its clients.
Security Risks: Moving an organization through the intermediate stages of cloud migration may pose security risks and potential productivity impacts. Corporate data and applications may be vulnerable to attack if security solutions and policies are not updated with cloud migration.
Resource Usage: Moving to the cloud requires much time and other resources. A poor cloud migration strategy could result in resource waste and higher costs for the company.
An organization and its customers may suffer from a protracted migration process. A business should carefully consider its migration strategy before starting the migration and make an effort to maximize performance and security throughout the entire migration process.
An organization must ensure that data and applications are secure throughout the cloud migration process. Even though a company might have pre- and post-migration security plans, this is insufficient to safeguard its resources. The organization will go through several intermediate states as data and applications move to the cloud.
Attackers may be able to steal data or exploit applications. At the same time, an organization is vulnerable if its security strategy does not change to provide adequate protection at each of these intermediate steps. A migration security strategy must be part of any corporate cloud migration plan. This includes strategies for guaranteeing proper corporate data and application protection throughout the migration.
By moving to the cloud, an organization can significantly reduce its infrastructure cost. An organization can benefit from the cost savings of its CSP’s optimizations and scale by outsourcing the management of its underlying infrastructure to a third-party provider.
However, a company can only fully benefit from cloud cost savings if its IT infrastructure is prepared for the cloud. The cost of the cloud may be higher than the cost of hosting the same infrastructure on-premises if an organization “lifts and shifts” legacy applications to cloud environments or purchases oversized service packages.
A further benefit of “as a service” infrastructure is that a company only pays for the services it needs. Since keeping track of ongoing cloud costs is frequently challenging and complicated, these costs continually rise unexpectedly until the monthly statement is received. There may be a trade-off between cloud migration’s immediate expenses and long-term advantages.
Long-term overhead and cost reduction are possible with architecture, application design, and cloud environment optimizations.
Also Read: How CIOs Can Maximize Business Value Leveraging Multi-cloud
Cloud migration is now a business initiative rather than a technical issue. Enterprises must develop and implement a thorough migration plan that aligns business drivers, fosters organizational buy-in, and handles past incidents to avoid pitfalls and achieve true cloud transformation.
The strategy will direct the migration process as a whole. It specifies which applications CIOs will migrate, how, when, and how. Each application’s migration strategy should be included in a migration plan, which limits the degree of change IT leaders will make to each application as it moves to the cloud.
The migration velocity, or how quickly businesses can move applications through the migration process, will be determined by the amount of change. Poor planning can delay migration, overlook dependencies, and result in outages.
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Swapnil Mishra is a Business News Reporter with over six years of experience in journalism and mass communication. With an impressive track record in the industry, Swapnil has worked with different media outlets and has developed technical expertise in drafting content strategies, executive leadership, business strategy, industry insights, best practices, and thought leadership. Swapnil is a journalism graduate who has a keen eye for editorial detail and a strong sense of language skills. She brings her extensive knowledge of the industry to every article she writes, ensuring that her readers receive the most up-to-date and informative news possible. Swapnil's writing style is clear, concise, and engaging, making her articles accessible to readers of all levels of expertise. Her technical expertise, coupled with her eye for detail, ensures that she produces high-quality content that meets the needs of her readers. She calls herself a plant mom and wants to have her own jungle someday.
