Mistakes made during the cloud migration process can cause business interruption and cost your business time and money. These are the top mistakes that are made in the cloud migration process and how to avoid them for a smooth migration to a cloud environment.
Author Alexandra Bohigian Marketing and Sales Director at Enola Labs
- Not Creating a Cloud Migration Strategy
Strategy is everything, especially when migrating to cloud. Just like any big business decision, strategy will help your business prepare for obstacles and clear a path to successful outcomes. It is one of the most important aspects of cloud migration, so failure to create a strategy will absolutely hinder success.
There are six application migration strategies, known as the ‘6 R's’. Your cloud migration strategy should center around one or a combination of the following elements.
Rehosting: This strategy is also known as "lift and shift", where you are simply taking an existing application and moving it to a cloud environment. This is optimal for quickly getting into the cloud.
Replatforming: Replatforming involves taking advantage of a few of the optimizations in the cloud without fully re-architecting the application.
Repurchasing: This strategy involves moving to a new cloud-based product, usually a SaaS (Software as a Service) model.
Refactoring/Re-architecting: Refactoring/re-architecting is a way to rebuild an app in the cloud using features that were not previously possible in the app's existing environment.
Retire: Working with a cloud migration expert or consultant may help your business realize it is not using all of its assets. This may mean completely retiring certain applications in order to focus attention on more important business functions.
Retain: Sometimes your business will not be ready to move a certain application to cloud, or it may not be the right time based on current business needs. You never have to move everything - you need to do what makes sense for your business.
2. Choosing the Wrong Cloud Environment for Your Needs
Cloud environments will differ on service offerings. For example, Amazon Web Services (AWS) has far more service offerings and capabilities than competing cloud providers. Billing models will also vary, with some charging per hour and others charging based on cloud instance sizes or by the minute. Ensure that the billing model and services you will utilize in the specific cloud environment align with your business needs.
3. Migrating Without Expert Guidance
While many cloud providers make it simple to educate oneself on what the cloud is and how to start utilizing cloud services, it takes deep knowledge of cloud migration to efficiently complete the process. Cloud migration without expert guidance is a sure way to guarantee delays in business services throughout the process.
Simply put, migrations can go wrong, and having a team ready to mitigate business interruption is going to be vital to your success. You need the right tools, engineers with specific skill sets, and overarching expert guidance for a smooth migration to cloud.
4. Not Choosing the Right Fit: Lift and Shift vs. Cloud-Native
As we discussed previously about application migration strategies, choosing how you migrate or build your application will largely affect how successful your migration to cloud is. Each business will have different needs, so there will never be a one size fits all approach to the cloud.
Lift and Shift tends to be a better option for businesses that are looking to quickly move to cloud and don't have a lot of extra money to spend. A cloud native approach is more expensive and timely, but it allows businesses to fully take advantage of all of the cost savings, optimizations, and capabilities of the cloud.
5. Not Choosing the Right Fit: Single vs. Multi-Cloud Environment
A single cloud environment is when a business is only using one cloud provider for all business needs. A multi-cloud environment is when a businesses chooses to store certain applications with one cloud service, and other applications with a different cloud service.
Large enterprises may choose a multi cloud environment as a risk mitigation strategy to not be locked into one cloud provider. Multi-cloud environments also may allow a business to take advantage of different cloud service offerings for specific products to be optimized as possible. A single cloud environment is typically less hassle and more secure. In the cloud, there is a shared responsibility for security. A multi-cloud approach could make it hard to ensure security needs are met, particularly when balancing the different needs of various cloud providers.
Reaping the Benefits of the Cloud
While any of the above mistakes might be made during the cloud migration process, your business will ultimately reap the rewards of migrating to a cloud environment. From increased efficiencies to greater security, there is no doubt that the cloud will be a vital hub of most business processes in the coming years.
About Alexandra Bohigian and Enola Labs
Alexandra Bohigian is Marketing and Sales Director for Enola Labs, a company that provides enterprise-grade expert guidance in technical strategy, cloud-enablement & web app development services, legacy modernization services, enterprise application development, and more. To learn more, visit their website here.
