Cloud migration is essential for businesses pursuing a digital transformation – allowing you to scale your resources and better manage your digital infrastructure.
However, businesses must overcome many hurdles to get the most out of cloud computing. A bad migration strategy could, at best, slow your processes down. At worst, you risk irreversible data loss or opening your business up to security vulnerabilities.
Getting your cloud migration strategy right can be difficult. But, if you avoid these five common challenges, you can dramatically speed up the process and ensure a successful migration! Managed service providers (MSPs) can handle this responsibility for you, easing your workload and ensuring a smooth transition.
In this article, you’ll learn why you should migrate to the cloud and how to ensure a successful migration in this article!
Why do businesses migrate to the cloud?
In the modern business landscape, there’s no space for ineffective, slow infrastructure that cannot rapidly scale with your business and its changing demands. The cloud is replacing legacy, on-premises technology with flexible, scalable, and cost-effective computing power around the world.
Here are the most important benefits of cloud migration:
- Better scalability: Resources and capacity can be scaled up or down depending on your demand/traffic.
- Improved performance: Cloud service providers offer powerful hardware and lightning-fast network connections.
- Cost savings: By adjusting resources on the fly, organisations can eliminate unnecessary assets and reduce the equipment needed.
- Improved digital experience: Consumers demand omnichannel user experiences. Cloud services help you build more responsive applications that use interconnected services to improve your user experience.
What are the common challenges faced during a cloud migration?
Businesses lack a comprehensive cloud migration plan
Cloud migration is an involved & delicate process. Unfortunately, many businesses fail to develop a comprehensive strategy for dealing with this transition – and instead prefer to adopt the so-called “lift and shift” strategy.
In reality, on-premise applications and services may not be ready, out-of-the-box, to be cloud-native. Migrating these workloads onto cloud servers may lead to compatibility issues, slowdowns or even data loss.
The solution to this challenge is simple: make sure you have developed a succinct plan before pulling the trigger.
Any cloud migration strategy should:
- Take into account the business value of moving to the cloud. What areas of the business would benefit the most from migration?
- Examine which applications and workflows best translate to a cloud-based environment. Some processes may migrate perfectly. Others may not. A plan should outline cloud-native replacements – such as Microsoft 365 apps.
- What timeline should your migration follow? Which applications should be migrated first?
Not modernising services & workflows for the cloud
As we mentioned prior, not all applications and services are best suited for the cloud. In fact, cloud-native services can look very different to their on-premise counterparts.
How? Cloud services benefit from a modular software architecture – such as microservices. Monolithic applications limit your ability to customise frontend experiences.
Some workloads aren’t designed to take advantage of your cloud resources – whereas older applications may be quite resource-inefficient.
There are two approaches to modernising workflows:
- Tinker with applications to make them more cloud friendly. Some applications may need to be refreshed to ensure compatibility.
- Replace workflows with cloud-native platforms.
Data Security and Compliance Risks
Cloud migration presents many preventable risks for data loss and leakage. Many businesses are hesitant to migrate to the cloud due to these concerns – with 56% citing security as a considerable concern.
A large part of this perceived risk is handing data to third-party companies in the form of cloud vendors. Intuitively, this makes sense – wouldn’t on-premise solutions provide better security?
In reality, cloud providers take security and compliance very seriously – and have numerous safeguards in place to protect your data.
In many cases, it’s actually easier for criminals to breach your on-premises servers than launching an attack on a cloud service provider like Azure, AWS or Google Cloud.
Moreover, cloud services have tools to automate compliance procedures and ensure tight access permissions to minimise insider threats.
So, is the cloud migration process risk-free? No. The major threat is indeed in the migration phase – as any of your data may be intercepted if your migration process is insecure.
How can we avoid this? An MSP will check your migration procedure before you go ahead and ensure that your sensitive data is protected from attackers and that you have data redundancies in place to prevent loss.
Lack of in-house expertise
Cloud migration is more complicated than you might think. Sure, vendors have developed intuitive migration tools to simplify the process such as Azure Migrate.
But, if anything does go wrong, your in-house IT staff may lack the expertise to quickly and effectively troubleshoot. The risks of this should be fairly evident: operational downtime and potential data loss!
Luckily, the solution is simple. Outsourcing to MSPs is the best way to ensure your migration process is handled by technicians with the correct level of expertise for the job.
Trust us, cloud migration isn’t a process you should ‘wing’ and hope for the best!
Unexpected migration costs
In order to save costs, many companies prefer to migrate on their own. However, this can end up costing more in the long run.
What are some hidden costs associated with the migration procedure?
- The most pressing is the cost of operational downtime and its impact on productivity. You’re likely to spend more time troubleshooting and configuring your cloud platform without a migration partner.
- Moreover, an MSP can train you and your staff on how to get the most out of your cloud services from day one.
- Lack of data recovery solutions and data redundancy. If anything goes wrong with your migration process, you may lose important data. MSPs operate with a strict data hygiene approach and will always insist on backing up important information. Lost data is very expensive to recover.
- Compatibility issues will present further challenges post-migration. These contribute to lost productivity, but incompatible software will still have to be altered or replaced – presenting another cost.
That’s why working with a consultant at an MSP is so important. They can better develop your migration strategy and budget more effectively to bring down your total cost of ownership (TCO).
Avoiding the above challenges, and the rest you may face, can help avoid these unexpected costs. Tapping into the expertise of migration professionals can help boost your ROI.
Let’s get your cloud migration right!
The theme is clear. Challenges can be avoided by working with a cloud migration partner. Costs can be minimised by developing a comprehensive and realistic migration strategy and following that to the tee.
By partnering with us, you will be able to eliminate compatibility issues and data security risks, ensuring a successful migration.
Ready to start your digital transformation and migrate to the cloud? Get started with out Azure Migration Workshop.