Cloud Migration Challenges: Top 7 Common Challenges

Businesses that invest in moving workloads to the cloud open up their environment to new scaling, performance, and innovation opportunities, but the path to the cloud isn’t always cut and dry. Organizations that fail to plan or prepare for cloud migration challenges can find themselves over budget, over time, and ill-equipped to deal with unexpected problems. Now, we’ll talk about the 7 most common cloud migration challenges.

The first Cloud Migration Challenge: Learn exactly what a Cloud Migration is!

Cloud migration is transforming the way companies do business. It gives organizations greater agility and scalability as they move their digital assets and applications off of the physical and into virtual servers, allowing them to access data securely anytime, anywhere.

Cloud migration also provides businesses with greater cost savings opportunities over traditional on-premise investments. By either partially or fully moving to the cloud, companies can better benefit from cloud providers who specialize in offering more features, increased security, hosted data centers, breadth of cloud services, public cloud or private cloud hosting, and other advantages tailored for specific business objectives, functions or industries.

Top 7 Cloud Migration Challenges

Financial cost

In the long run, the cost of cloud migration sees returns of increased efficiency, lower admin costs, and streamlined processes. But getting there can still feel like an expensive uphill battle. Financial concerns touch on almost every cloud migration challenge. There’s the immediate cost to making the migration itself in addition to the long-term financial risks of low or slow adoption and training after the migration has occurred.

The top costs of cloud migration include:

• Rewriting application architecture for the cloud
• Investing in people and tools needed to migrate successfully
• Training users on the new systems
• Performance issues including latency, interoperability, dependencies on non-cloud apps, and downtime
• Bandwidth costs
• Despite this intimidating list, successful and financially sensible cloud migration is possible.

Lack of strategy and planning

Many organizations start migrating to the cloud without dedicating enough time and attention to their strategy. However, successful cloud adoption requires thorough end-to-end planning as each application may have different requirements and may need a different approach.

Missing clear business cases and, therefore, KPIs makes it challenging to build a roadmap and then understand if the process was successful. That’s why having a reliable migration partner is of so much essence for organizations without in-house IT expertise – helping you plan all steps and avoid costly mistakes.

Data Security & Privacy

Another cloud migration challenge is data security and privacy. Data security and privacy are primary concerns during cloud migration because many businesses fear their migration operations might crash. Therefore it is important to have a word prior to the migration with the cloud service providers regarding their security practices.

Businesses should be prepared to get answers on where their data will be stored, would there be end-to-end encryption provided, what are their security and privacy policies, and what security regulations are the cloud service provider is compliant with. By asking these questions, a business will get a better idea about their vendor and learn about their security protocols.

Data Governance, Trust, and Quality

Data governance defines how data should be gathered and used within an organization. It is crucial to establish compliance, data access, data democratization, and a common data vocabulary for data analysis. In this way, data governance is an essential prerequisite for migrating trusted, quality data to the cloud.

Strong data governance supports smart cloud migration. Before migrating to the cloud, leaders must ensure the data they’ve chosen to migrate is trusted, validated, and clean. Again, a solid data governance foundation will ensure future cloud data is both useful and usable, and establish who can use it, and how. Without a strong governance foundation, businesses will face several complex challenges along the way.

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.

Data Transfer and Bandwidth Limitations

Another challenge faced during a cloud migration is transferring large volumes of data from on-premises systems to the cloud environment. When dealing with vast datasets or mission-critical applications, data transfer can take a significant amount of time, leading to potential delays and increased downtime.

The data transfer process heavily relies on the available network bandwidth. If your internet connection or network infrastructure has limited capacity, it can significantly slow down the migration process. To overcome bandwidth limitations, organizations need to implement efficient data migration strategies. This might involve using incremental data transfers, prioritizing critical data, or employing data compression techniques to optimize the use of available bandwidth.

Too Many Tools

Determining which tools (and which combination of tools) is best for your organization can be a challenge. With so many tools available to cloud users today, it can feel impossible to keep up or know what to do. And even if you do keep up, adding on every shiny new tool might not even be that beneficial.

Organizations looking to offload software, infrastructure, and even user desktops to the cloud can take advantage of the popular ‘as a service’ model, which involves an organization paying for remote hosting and management of these essential company resources. This takes work off your in-house IT and security staff and helps protect against downtime due to cybersecurity incidents.

Conclusion

Migrating to the cloud may well be the right move for your company. Before taking the plunge, though, make sure you have a clear cloud migration strategy and are aware of the risks of possible incompatibility of existing architecture, security threats, and reduced visibility and control. In addition, do your best to avoid data loss and/or incomplete data deletion, overspending, and added latency. Cloud migration can do wonders for your business if you can manage to fend off these issues.