Top 5 Cloud Migration Challenges

Cloud Migration Challenges

Cloud migration can bring significant benefits, but there are quite a few challenges along the way. Let’s take a closer look at the top five challenges that organizations encounter when moving to the cloud.

#1. Not having a cloud migration strategy

Businesses move to the cloud to enjoy increased service availability, scalability, or any of the other benefits that the cloud promises. However, taking full advantage of the cloud requires careful design and planning to ensure that an organization has selected the cloud best suited to its use case. For example, public, private, and hybrid cloud deployments all have their pros and cons, and different cloud providers and cloud distribution models (SaaS, PaaS, IaaS, etc.) are optimized for different use cases.

A cloud migration strategy should describe the goals that the cloud migration is intended to achieve and how to measure success. Based on these goals, cloud services can be selected, and a strategy can be developed to guide the migration.

#2. Complex existing architecture

Cloud migration involves moving data storage and applications from on-prem environments to cloud infrastructure. Often, this is accomplished in stages to ensure that one step was completed successfully before moving on to the next.

If an organization has a complex existing IT architecture, then developing and executing on a cloud migration strategy may be difficult. Certain systems may need to be collocated to provide high-quality services, and a complex architecture may make it difficult to identify and document interdependencies and develop a phased strategy for moving certain components or systems to the cloud.

#3. Long migration process

Cloud migrations are not a quick and easy process. Often, migrations are performed in multiple stages with in-depth testing and validation between each stage of the process.

The speed and smoothness of the cloud migration process depend on the quality and detail of the cloud migration strategy. A non-existent or unclear strategy can result in additional time spent figuring out the process along the way and may result in work needing to be performed multiple times to get them right.

The longer the cloud migration process, the greater the cost and impact on the organization. During the intermediate stages of the cloud migration process, infrastructure costs are increased because the business is paying for both on-prem and cloud infrastructure.

#4. High cloud costs

Cloud services can be expensive. In some cases, an organization looking to move to the cloud to decrease the costs associated with its IT infrastructure may find that the cloud is actually more expensive than an on-prem data center. Sticker shock during or after a cloud migration is often a result of inadequate research and planning. If an organization lacks visibility into its IT infrastructure and how it is used, then consumption of cloud services – and their associated costs – may exceed expectations. Similarly, insufficient research about a cloud provider and their policies may result in unexpected billings or fees. An extended migration process can also drive up the costs if systems spend an extended period of time in an intermediate state.

Careful planning can provide visibility into and even alleviate some of the costs of the cloud. A clear understanding of an organization’s IT solutions and their requirements can help an organization to predict its cloud consumption. Additionally, an in-depth understanding of a business’s cloud needs and providers’ offerings can help to optimize cloud infrastructure and drive down the costs of the cloud.

#5. Data security and compliance risks

As organizations move to the cloud, data security and regulatory compliance are major concerns. Data and applications hosted on the cloud must be secured at the same level as they are on-prem, and some cloud deployment models are better suited to this than others.

For example, in public cloud deployments, a company shares servers and other infrastructure with other cloud customers. Vulnerabilities in the underlying servers or the isolation of the virtual machines (VMs) hosted on these servers could result in data leakage or other security incidents. Additionally, an organization may not have visibility into where its data and applications are actually hosted, which can be problematic for some data privacy laws such as the GDPR.