7 Pitfalls to Avoid When Migrating to the Cloud
Cloud facilitates businesses to achieve their goals effectively. Enterprises are increasingly adopting cloud because of its numerous benefits. As per a recent report by Forrester, the global public cloud market has increased from $146B in 2017 to $178B in 2018 and will continue to grow at a 22% CAGR (Compound Annual Growth Rate). 83% of companies’ data will be in the cloud by 2020.
While cloud migration has its own advantages like storage optimization, security, capacity, and performance, the process of migration is not as easy as it seems. It involves complex processes which may lead to multiple issues, if the process is not executed carefully. Don’t worry though because this post is here to help you migrate smoothly. We’ve enlisted here, 7 pitfalls to avoid while migrating your business environment to the cloud.
7 Pitfalls of cloud migration and How to Avoid Them:
1.  FAILURE TO EFFECTIVELY FATHOM REQUIREMENTS AND TASKS:
Before you start planning to migrate your applications to the cloud, it is important that you assess and understand the requirements of your business. Misanalysis of requirements may result in complex concerns while migrating the applications from on-premise to cloud environment. Even if the migration goes through without any hiccups, it is highly likely that post-migration issues are looming around the corner. Therefore, you should validate the complete design and application program architecture while starting your shift to the cloud.
2.  THE RIGHT SERVICE PROVIDER MAKES A SEA OF DIFFERENCE:
Requirement analysis opens the doors to choosing a good cloud services vendor – this choice should be considered a vital step. The service provider you choose can literally make or mar your migration as each vendor suits a specific type of business needs. This is partly the reason you wouldn’t find a flat-out comparison between the various technology providers available in the market (like Microsoft, Amazon, and Google). Reviewing the licensing agreements is an ideal first step, but additionally here are few other prerequisites like:
- Whether the cloud providers comply with recognized standards and whether their quality frameworks demonstrate an adherence to industry best practices and standards.
- Make sure the provider’s platform and technologies align with your current environment requirements and support your cloud objectives.
- For data governance and security purpose, understand their data loss and breach notification processes and ensure they are aligned with your organization’s risk appetite and legal obligations.
Apart from these, you need to outline a comprehensive cloud migration strategy with the service provider, like we do for our clients, to avoid critical issues. We help to migrate your entire data and even entire applications into Amazon Redshift cloud environment in record time with minimal fault tolerance.
3.  LACK OF PRE-PREPARATION:
A cloud migration process needs more preparation before starting the implementation process. Once you have finalized the requirements and tasks which you are going to perform in the migration, check if your organization is looking to use a private cloud, a public cloud, or a hybrid.
Plan the tasks and processes to be carried out through entire migration, and companies should know each process of migration back to front and understand it to reduce the risk in post migration.
4.  IGNORING THE INTRICACIES OF THE ACTUAL MIGRATION PROCESS:
Once you are done with preparation, you need to start analyzing the migration process. This will help in understanding the complexities associated with the application migration and accordingly execute the migration process. If you miss concentrating on the migration process, it will create post migration issues that cloud lead to some major impacts on your business especially while making the decision. Moreover, it will clear the requirements about the software components, data, and functionalities that can be migrated to the cloud and the ones that can be skipped.
- Lack of application performance visibility during the migration process will occur during the transition phase, it is inevitable that performance problems will occur. To mitigate these issues as soon as possible, you need to have a clear picture of application performance, so you can easily pinpoint what may be causing the problem.
- Test sufficiently, it is one of the essential parts to make sure there are no adverse effects in the working of the application in post-migration. Perform testing with different cloud-specific test cases and scenarios helps you identify different errors associated with the application and integration environment to resolve them before it leads to a major break-down due to severe bugs.
5.  POOR UNDERSTANDING OF DOWNTIME AND BACKUP
Businesses are now running multiple apps in cloud-based environments, it is important to consider the bandwidth and latency before migrating applications and data to the cloud. If an organization is migrating from one cloud to another cloud, all the applications and services residing in them will get affected if not arranged with a proper backup. Even the minutest downtime can result in huge losses to the business in terms of revenue, reputation, and customer loyalty so backup environment to run the applications till the migration is complete. The allocated resources must have the capacity to keep the applications and must be able to handle the user’s load on the servers. If you are unable to avoid the downtime completely, at least, try to minimize it as much as possible.
6.  THIRD-PARTY INTEGRATION:
Companies are operating multiple apps in cloud-based environments. When transitioning from on-premise to cloud-based platform, organizations must re-integrate all the third-party solutions that they use. Third-party solutions should be integrated and tested out before the organization complete the transitions.
7.  Data Security:
Mostly, organizations stumble when migrating to the cloud because of inexperience rather than carelessness. Companies need to protect their data during the process of transition and they need to choose a cloud service model that appropriately protects their most important data assets. It is also recommended to give training to employees regarding the new security standards. When data is being moved from a server to a cloud or from one cloud to another cloud environment, your organization’s data is most vulnerable. Either the network security or the cloud’s security can completely protect your data from any breaches during the migration.
AmtexBI delivers fast, secure and 10x faster cloud migration adoption with reliable insights for decision making. If you need help with your cloud requirements Contactus.
