5 major cloud migration challenges and ways to overcome them

Ever thought about why businesses move into the cloud?

The most significant benefit of embracing cloud solutions for business is cost efficiency. By migrating your workloads to the public cloud, you can reduce your Total Cost of Ownership (TCO) by as much as 40%! 

It could be something else for your business. However, the truth remains that moving to the cloud helps save costs that you would otherwise incur building on your on-prem infrastructure and managing it with an increasing IT workforce. 

However, as simple as it sounds, cloud migration can turn into a nightmare if you are not ready or have not done your homework first. First, let’s understand the key challenges a business might face while migrating to the cloud, and then we will look into the ways those challenges can be overcome. 

Cloud Migration Challenges

The most common cloud migration challenges 

1. Determining the workloads suitable for migration

Cloud migration often takes place in stages. To ensure a successful cloud migration, you must deeply assess all your systems, data, and applications. You have to figure out the workloads that can easily be shifted to the cloud and the workloads that can wait. You can not do it alone. You need to speak to your colleagues, department heads, and several other stakeholders to get their buy-ins before you can embark on this path of digital transformation. 

2. Selection of a cloud migration strategy

There are numerous different ways to move your business to the cloud. However, a few migration strategies have proven their worth over the years. Organizations leverage some key cloud migration strategies while moving their data and systems to the cloud.

• Lift and shift: It is arguably the most straightforward cloud migration path. Under this approach, you take the selected data and apps from your on-prem servers and migrate them to the cloud environment without making any changes in the code. 

• Refactor: Under refactoring, you shift the workloads to the cloud while repairing the code to make it compatible with the cloud infrastructure. 

• Retire: Under this approach, complex legacy systems that no longer add value to business growth and can not be moved to the cloud are removed to reduce costs and complexity. 

Replatforming, retaining, rehosting, and repurchasing are a few other strategies that can be adopted to ensure a seamless and successful migration to the cloud. 

3. Migration cost 

Another challenge you might face while shifting your workloads to the cloud is the high costs associated with cloud solutions for business. 

Often, organizations fail to consider the full scope of expenses, such as the cost of data migration and paying for the cloud infrastructure and services once the data and systems are deployed to the cloud. 

4. Data security and compliance risks 

In today’s age, when customers and governments are highly concerned and protective about their data, it is vital to have a clear strategy built around data collection, storage, and usage. 

To ensure a migration that helps you advance, you must seek reliable cloud solutions for business. You must ensure the cloud services provider understands data security protocols and compliance requirements to help you stay ahead of the competition. Sadly, numerous incidences of data theft and loss have occurred for companies running their workloads in the cloud. 

5. Expertise

Many organizations face the challenge of insufficient resources and expertise internally to ensure seamless cloud migration progress. If you decide to migrate the resources internally, you may have to set up a cloud team and hire resources. It requires significant effort and investment. 

However, you can tackle this hurdle by contacting a few cloud migration service providers and outsourcing the project to the vendor you finally decide to work with. 

How can you overcome these challenges?

One way is to stick to the best cloud migration practices. There are many, but let us share the most essential ones:

• Assess your current IT setup

• Set clear goals and objectives

• Determine a suitable cloud deployment model

• Develop a detailed migration plan

• Identify and mitigate risks

• Train and develop skills for your IT team

• Break down the migration process into smaller parts

• Engage a cloud migration service provider

Conclusion 

Cloud computing offers numerous business and strategic benefits, such as improved agility, scalability, and resiliency. In fact, it has successfully become the key enabler of large-scale digital transformation programs. 

However, implementing cloud solutions for business entails a series of challenges. To successfully overcome these challenges, you must be well aware of them and prepared accordingly. Partnering with reliable cloud migration service providers can help you navigate the uncharted waters of cloud migration.