Businesses are looking to improve their organisational, operational and technical capabilities by migrating from On-Premises workloads and Data canters to the cloud. Cloud Migration helps the organisation to replace outdated hardware, eliminates expensive upgrades and ends high-priced data canter leases. It also includes reducing the Information Technology (IT) cost and improving productivity as well as increasing the operational flexibility.

The common reason why most organisation is looking toward migrating into the cloud is that the cloud environment provides scalability, availability and reliability. However, migrating to the cloud is more than moving the digital assets to a cloud computing environment. It requires you to find the least disrupting transition strategy by choosing the most suitable cloud deployment model and finding the best cloud migration vendor.

There are a few ways of migrating to the cloud. Organisations with legacy applications at the core can either opt for cloud migration or cloud modernisation. Cloud Migration focuses on the lift and shift of applications, while cloud modernisation is more on re-architects existing applications for the cloud.

Migrating a legacy system will address short-term needs, but it comes with significant operational challenges, which typically include software upgrades, monitoring, resource utilisation and ongoing support. The cloud migration approach usually requires more personnel and resources resulting in higher operational costs.

Applications are usually the main element in the cloud modernisation process. It requires Re-architecting, which involves analysing application components, mapping them to cloud-native services and rebuilding them for efficiently running on cloud-managed services. The upfront challenges of cloud modernisation include a learning curve, short-term user disruption and initial investment.

An organisation should have a dynamic set of checklists to identify the challenges and procedures that need to be followed to ensure a smooth transition for the entire organisation before they migrate into the cloud.

Identify your cloud strategy and KPIs

The strategy for each organisation differs based on their urgency and reason for migrating in the first place. The strategy entails the alignment of business-critical strategies with the proposed migration techniques. A list of Primary KPIs that need to be monitored include:

• The page response times
• Computing capacity
• Memory capacity
• Resource availability

Determining the applications to migrate

The process of migration is highly scalable and modular. An organisation can opt for a deep or shallow scale of migration depending on its workload requirements. A detailed analysis of applications can help to determine which applications that need to be migrated and what is the strategy required to adopt each of them. Cost efficiency and platform security are the two major areas that need to be taken into consideration before deciding on any migrations.

Creating the data migration strategy

It is extremely crucial for an organisation to maintain data integrity and business continuity. The order of migration is also important due to the existing dependencies of the applications.

Choosing the right cloud provider

Choosing a reliable cloud service provider should be the foremost thing when planning a cloud migration strategy. There are multiple cloud platforms available: private, public and hybrid platforms.

• Private cloud platforms are secure but require a greater level of organisational involvement for every process. They are particularly suitable for organisations with high-security requirements.
• Public cloud platforms are highly scalable but have a lower level of control imposed by the organisation. They are preferred for large corporations with different scalability needs for different teams and divisions.
• Hybrid or multi-cloud platforms are a mixture of public and private platforms and provide a good balance between the features.

The next and final step is migrating individual applications and data warehouses to the cloud, depending on their complexity of architecture and dependency. Validating applications as the migration is in the process will ensure a smoother and more efficient transition and also will establish data security.

Moving into the cloud can be very challenging for some organisations. Cloud is fundamental to your business strategy; however, most organisations are having second thoughts about Migrating to the cloud. It can be very complex when migrating to the cloud. Here are some common challenges your organisation might be facing as they move into the cloud journey.

The Lack of Strategy

It is very significant for an organisation to lay out their strategy and set a timeline when moving its data into the cloud. Successful cloud adoption and implementation require an end to end cloud migration planning. From identifying what type of data to be moved, how should it be moved (partially/fully) or which environment this data should be sitting in.

Different applications and data set may have different requirements and considerations. Some may require a different approach to cloud migration. Organisations are advised to have a clear business case for each workload that they plan to migrate to the cloud.

Cost Management

Most organisations didn’t set clear KPIs and understand what they plan to spend or save after migration. Without setting a clear KPI, the organisation will be facing difficulties in understanding if the migration was a success from a financial view. Cloud environments are dynamic, and the costs can change rapidly as new services are adopted, and application usage grows.

Vendor Selections

The common problem for most organisations is vendor lock-in. Cloud providers usually offer a large variety of services; however, not many of them can be extended to other Cloud Platforms. Migrating the workloads from one cloud to another is a lengthy and costly process. Hence, it is important to understand the vendor’s capabilities before engaging. There are a lot of common cases where the organisations start using cloud services and later find it difficult to switch providers when the current provider is not able to fit their requirements.

The Data Security and Compliance

The Major Obstacle for most organisations is Data Security and Compliance. Cloud services usually use a shared responsibility model, where they take responsibility for securing the infrastructure, while the customer will be responsible for attaining the data and the workloads.

The cloud provider may provide powerful security measures; however, it is the organisation’s responsibility to ensure that they configure them correctly and ensure that all services and applications have the appropriate security control. Transferring large volumes of data can be sensitive, and configuring the access controls for applications across different environments creates significant exposure.

Identifying all the major challenges that an organisation might face while migrating into the cloud will help an organisation to be more prepared and able to come out with a strategic plan to assure the success of its cloud migration.