Thinking about cloud computing as a deployment method is one of the most in-demand and dynamic ways to deploy today. It has transformed traditional business models and made new things possible in the organizational workspace, such as online collaboration and predictive analytics as a service. For most enterprises, migrating to the cloud has become a question not of if, but of how.
The process of migrating to the cloud is an equation with many variables. While it may seem challenging at first, proper preparation will help ensure a seamless migration. In this blog, we'll discuss some of the hurdles to keep in mind as your company prepares for this move.
What are the main challenges of migrating data to the cloud?
In our role of creating and implementing new cloud environments for a wide range of customers, a large part of this effort is supporting our customers in overcoming the challenges of shifting workloads and addressing points that are not fully optimized. The cloud migration challenges that are most noticeable are:
Budget overrun vs. planned budget
Security vulnerabilities and critical service failures
Lack of a clear strategy delineated by business and data management goals
Cloud sprawl caused by not having a clear understanding of the full scope of cloud environments
Human error and lack of skills required to operate the new infrastructure.
The good news is that none of these challenges is without a solution. Let's take a look at how you can overcome them from cloud migration and make your transition as smooth as possible.
Cloud migration budget
Cloud expansion often goes hand in hand with initial budget saturation: cloud instances keep popping up for no clear, intentional reason and costs start to spiral out of control. To keep your cloud expenses under control, you must measure these costs from day one and allocate them to specific cost centers within your organization. Measuring your costs and performance on an ongoing basis is essential to evaluate the ROI of your cloud migration to determine if the migration project was successful.
Performing a cloud migration strategy
One of the most common mistakes that can prevent you from taking full advantage of the benefits of the cloud is not having a clear business objective behind the move or a well thought out migration plan. Often, managers seek help after they find themselves stuck after having done a fair amount of work on the migration. In this regard, we often have to re-formulate business objectives and rebuild your migration strategy from scratch. Starting from strategy ensures that you can easily navigate the transition and avoid analysis paralysis during later stages.
This is very important as there are a wide variety of options along the way, from whether you opt for a private, public or hybrid cloud infrastructure to choosing between Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS), Platform as a Service
(PaaS) and Software as a Service (SaaS).
Planning each phase of the migration from the beginning instructs you to make the right decisions to reach your goal and helps you avoid unnecessary expenses.
Gain control over the stages of migration to the cloud
Cloud sprawl is another common cloud migration issue. Cloud sprawl means that your organization cannot gain fully centralized visibility and control of all components of your cloud infrastructure. If your company is doing exploits with multiple cloud instances, services, or sometimes even providers, it is not possible to have full accountability for the resources in use.
There are some preventative steps to help you avoid this situation and implement unified management of all cloud services.
The first step is to perform an audit of the IT function prior to migration. This is very important to understand the roles and business processes that currently exist and what your organization will look like after the migration.
Once you have overcome silos between different service groups within your organization and achieved full accountability, the next step is to keep this vision clear during each phase of cloud migration. In addition, it is helpful to implement visible accountability through dashboards so that you manage all cloud services and costs in one place.
About cloud security
Security and availability issues are other common cloud migration issues that need to be addressed. To avoid security weaknesses or downtime during the move, make sure your IT group has an in-house DevOps engineer with cloud security expertise or consult with your cloud provider.
Security measures should be naturally integrated into DevOps operations and should include the following:
Automation of security processes.
Define security configuration parameters in cloud instances.
Design continuous monitoring systems.
From an infrastructure availability standpoint, there are two main concerns: availability at the component level (a specific component or microservice can fail in isolation) and the architecture level. As you move to the cloud, you must design redundancy and availability into the most critical components.
Train employees on your cloud solutions.
One of the most commonly cited cloud migration issues is not cost or security concerns, but the lack of training for your employees. You should keep in mind that the organization of IT functions in the cloud is quite different from the same processes that run on-premises, such as application development, infrastructure as code, and automation tools.
Ensuring that staff members are aligned and have the necessary skills, knowledge and understanding to operate the new infrastructure is important. The best cloud providers offer team-based training sessions or video tutorials. Allocating time for training and certifications should be included in your migration schedule.
In conclusion, migrating to the cloud is not just a challenge, but an opportunity to make existing business processes more agile and innovative. As a first step, there must be a balance of all the infrastructure components, business processes and internal expertise at your disposal and create a strategy that encompasses all the needs of your organization in your cloud migration journey.
Comments