Cloud computing offers businesses a wide range of potential benefits such as higher productivity, easier scalability, greater flexibility, improved cost-effectiveness and more.
Those that still haven't made this transition are moving quickly to catch up or expand their use of these tools. In 2020, 61% of businesses migrated workloads to the cloud, while global spending on enterprise cloud platforms is expected to increase by 23% in 2021 to reach $332.3 billion.
However, undergoing a cloud migration is a challenging task. The cost of failure can be high, and problems may be more common than you think. According to the Cloud Security Alliance, 90% of CIOs have experienced failed or disrupted data migration projects, with the complexity of these being a major issue.
Meanwhile, 74% of companies have moved applications back to on-premises from the cloud. This means more downtime and wasted investments, and can result in businesses being more wary of cloud deployments in the future.
So how can you minimize the risk of falling victim to this? Here are a few cloud migration challenges you may encounter and what you can do about them.
1. Developing the right strategy
One of the first mistakes many firms make when adopting cloud computing is going into the migration without a clear plan in place. Before you embark on steps like comparing providers, you need to know exactly what your current infrastructure looks like, which workloads you'll prioritize for migration and how much downtime you can expect. A clear timetable that includes KPIs for measuring success can help you see if you're on track.
Learn more: 7 Steps to Build and Execute Your Cloud Strategy Roadmap
2. Identifying the right migration approach
There are several options for transferring workloads to the cloud, and it's vital you understand the pros and cons of each before committing to a plan. For example, a 'lift and shift' approach that migrates workloads essentially unchanged from an on-premise data center to the cloud is often the quickest option, but it may not take full advantage of cloud technology. On the other hand, rearchitecting your workloads to build a cloud-native solution may be more beneficial in the long run, but you'll have to determine whether it's worth the extra time and expense involved.
3. Keeping costs under control
Spiraling costs are another leading cause of cloud migration failures, and this is often a direct result of a lack of previous planning. Every time you have to change course or correct errors will add to the overall expense. However, these aren’t the only causes of cost overruns. Being too ambitious too soon can result in you overextending on solutions before they've had a chance to prove return on investment (ROI), while other hidden costs such as training expenses and ensuring data is compatible with cloud tools can also quickly add up. A good change management plan can help you keep on top of these.
4. Skills shortages
Finding the right people to manage the process is key, but if you don't have expertise within the organization in your specific cloud platform, this can greatly slow down the migration. Research by HashiCorp suggests 57% of businesses cite a skills shortage as a challenge to developing a multi-cloud environment. Bringing in new people can be expensive, especially if you're competing for limited available talent, so you may need to slow down the scale of your rollout to give internal employees time to effectively upskill.
5. Maintaining flexibility
The ability to scale up on demand or change direction at short notice is often regarded as one of the key benefits of a cloud strategy. However, if you're overly dependent on a single vendor for your services, you may find yourself locked into a less flexible contract that isn't right for you. If you do need to change course for any reason, it's therefore important that you're able to move your data to another vendor as easily as possible. Be sure to check service level agreements on what to expect if you're exiting a contract.
6. Ensuring security
Security worries remain the number one issue that prevents firms adopting the cloud, so you'll need to keep this front of mind throughout the process to assuage any worries within the business and ensure you're well protected. While most major cloud providers have very strong security measures to protect data when it's held in their systems, many firms may not realize just how much of the security environment remains in their hands. Issues such as access control failures, configuration mistakes and other user errors can leave sensitive data exposed, so it's vital you do a full audit of what you'll be responsible for and have a plan in place to cope with this.
7. Overcoming adoption resistance
You need to ensure everyone who will interact with the system on a day-to-day basis understands how it works and is confident in using it. Adoption resistance can undo all your good work, and if users don't embrace the tools, you'll never see a positive ROI. There are several ways to overcome this that should be considered as part of your change management plan. Executive buy-in, a strong focus on user education and training, and careful technology selection to prioritize intuitiveness and user-friendliness all play a part in getting employees on board.
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