There can be numerous benefits of migrating to the cloud, like scalability, improved efficiency, simplified management, business agility and lower costs. Cloud migration can be considered the start of a digital transformation for businesses, and enables organizations to quickly adapt to the changes and latest technologies. It is important in today’s changing business landscape to be able to adapt to the changes in technology quickly. For these reasons and many others, it’s estimated that about 83% of the business workloads will be in the cloud storage by the end of 2020.
As per the experts in cloud storage, the desire of businesses to transform digitally is the driving factor for increased cloud adoption and engagement. The introduction of cloud services has changed the way information technology is consumed and delivered, which has allowed companies to reach great innovation levels. While there are many important benefits for cloud migration, there are also many challenges that businesses face after migration.
Moving the infrastructure to critical applications is a decision that businesses do not take lightly. Once the decision is made, the planning and execution of the shifting should be thoughtfully done considering the best options. However, many businesses regularly fail to take into account post cloud migration considerations which should have been done prior to migration. These considerations should be incorporated to the overall plan of cloud migration. Failure to do so can result in problems with underutilization, increased risks, confusion among employees and many more.
Below are some of the cloud migration challenges that businesses might come across and should be prepared to handle.
Underutilization and Unbudgeted Charges
Once the migration is completed, it’s important for businesses to follow proper steps to make sure they get the most out of the cloud solutions. The agility and flexibility offered by the cloud based solutions can be very beneficial to businesses. However, it should be managed and controlled to keep issues like underutilization, increased risk, unbudgeted costs, and compliance at bay. You can follow the tips below to prevent these issues from happening.
- Identify various benchmarks and define targets in the important areas like cost, RPO/RTO, availability, and compliance.
- Establish business governance with continual monitoring and measurement, combined with periodic management review and oversight. In addition, operational and historical data should be maintained.
- Employ ongoing and proactive optimization of cloud across different tiers like cost. For instance, proactive provisioning and planning to make use of the inherent flexibility of cloud storage services using features like scheduled applications, autoscaling, and environment health checks. It also includes buying reserved instances, leveraging automation and DevOps to monitor actions and environments. The actions can include division wide consolidated analysis and billing, shutting down unwanted or unused instances.
- Educate yourself on how outsourcing to managed service providers can help you save on costs and resources.
Management of Operational and Organizational Changes
The biggest challenge might not always be technology. It is usually the processes and people that need to adapt to the technology. Employees from various departments should be involved and engaged in the migration tasks, right from the beginning, even though the degree and type of the activities will vary. Managing change, consistent with the other shifts in IT is important for a successful transformation to the cloud storage services. If you focus only on technology, it can lead only to poor results.
Executing applications in the cloud can change the responsibilities and roles of many people across teams. This includes human resources, compliance, and legal and can start new positions like DevOps engineers, cloud architects, and security professionals. For this reason, it is important for the leadership to offer proper education, ongoing training and messaging to make sure that all the employees are completely enabled, comfortable and capable doing their daily things.
Testing
Testing is a very important step in the journey to cloud migration. Proper testing in place can help avoid unwanted or unexpected gaps in scalability, business processes, database errors and server breakdowns. Above all, having proper testing in place will ensure that all the applications run seamlessly in the new environment.
Downtime
Having proper security and monitoring practices will ensure that the downtime is very low. With these measures, downtime will not be much of an issue, but should be considered a challenge that businesses should be prepared to confront. As per the results of a study conducted on downtime, it can cost businesses an average of 5.6K dollars per minute.
Businesses can consider adopting multi cloud or multi location environment to avoid outages. There should be adequate backup, disaster recovery, and availability strategies in place. It’s always better to have workloads across varying locations, as it can add resiliency and cut down the downtime risks.
Security
Data breaches and thefts are occurring at a very big rate and the risks that are associated to protect and guard data are legitimate. It can be nerve wracking for businesses to offer the control of proprietary and sensitive data to a third party. To get rid of security concerns after cloud migration, you need to make sure that the cloud service providers offer user identity management, secure authentication, and access control. When functioning in a hybrid cloud environment, it’s important for the team to focus on the physical security of the complete database and the environment.
Practicing secure data storage is a necessity, as most of the data breaches and violations are caused by either human errors (unintentional or intentional) or due to a failure in identity and access control, data storage and data management security. Moreover, those businesses that select a public cloud provider should understand that the security standards have increased much in the last years. Security inside the public cloud should involve partnership between the user and the service provider. This means that it is very much important to have good understanding on the ownership areas for security.
In the case of public cloud storage systems like AWS, the well accepted and recognized security model is a shared responsibility model. In this case, the service provider is the one who is responsible for making the cloud secure. This includes hardware, physical infrastructure and software, whereas the customer will be responsible for all system security above platform, data, applications, operating system and network traffic. Customers should be able to find out the best ways to handle post migration responsibilities. For instance, they can use procedures, tools, and managed service providers who have experience in cloud services.
You need to understand that migrating from legacy infrastructure to the latest cloud storage is a serious transition. But, if the businesses have an idea of the potential challenges after the migration beforehand, they can be prepared to take the necessary actions and steps to prevent it. Planning out the migration process and coming up with a timeline designed to find and fix the problems quickly when they arise can ensure a smooth transition.
