Digital transformation is no longer a novelty for modern businesses. It’s becoming the norm. As organizations gravitate towards hybrid working models, adopting digital technologies is a must. In fact, the digital transformation market is expected to grow to $3.3 trillion by 2025 due to this reason.
Cloud migration is one of the most crucial steps of digital transformation. Migrating your business processes and systems to the cloud improves efficiency, mobility, and scalability. Additionally, it helps you adapt to the evolving needs of a dispersed workforce.
However, it’s crucial to understand that cloud migration isn’t as simple as moving on-premise applications to a public cloud. A lack of planning and expertise could turn the migration into an unprecedented catastrophe.
In the following sections, we’ll outline a few key reasons why cloud migrations fail. We’ll also outline ways to avoid these pitfalls.
Let’s get started.
Poor Planning
You can’t reap the benefits of the cloud without a well-defined migration strategy. Hopping on the cloud migration bandwagon without a concrete plan could lead to complex and expensive issues in the future. That, in turn, would defeat the purpose of moving to the cloud.
Start with a cloud migration readiness assessment to understand where your organization stands. Next, identify the processes, applications, and systems that need to be moved to the cloud. This is also a good time to evaluate the business case for cloud migration, so you know explicitly what good looks like for you and your organization.
Thereafter, it’s time to build a rock-solid plan that outlines the steps you’ll take to implement the migration strategy. It should include the goals you want to accomplish and the KPIs you’ll use to measure success.
Wrong Migration Approach
Most organizations lack experienced and knowledgeable employees who can walk them through cloud migration. It often leads them to choose the lift and shift approach, which is the easiest cloud migration model.
Simply put, it involves moving on-premise applications and systems to a cloud-based environment. What you don’t realize in this method is that many apps need to be reconfigured to harness the benefits of the cloud.
This isn’t necessarily the wrong place to start, but trying to quickly bring your internal team up to scratch, especially without a track record of actual field experience, can end up with your team using your organisation as a guinnea pig – a situation you never want to be in. By choosing the right partner, you and your team can be confident that you are taking the right approach, and you have the real world expertise needed to get you to the finish line.
Budget Overshoot
Lack of planning and expert guidance can quickly escalate the TCO (total cost of ownership) of cloud migration. If you don’t have the foresight to predict potential migration challenges, you’ll end up overspending further.
It’s essential to identify various costs involved in cloud migration before getting started. Also, you need to have a clear idea of various issues that could derail the migration and escalate costs down the line. By building explicitly for budget, you can ensure that your cloud costs will be predictable, consistent and controlled – but you need to know how to make that happen.
Heavy Operational Support
Unless you’ve got an experienced IT team, your organization will struggle to stay up-to-speed with the evolving cloud landscape. This is normal – as it’s unrealistic for a small team to be able to keep up with evolving technologies in different directions. Partnering with a company with a track record of tackling the distracting operations can take the burden off your shoulders.
Lack of Governance
The shift to the cloud isn’t an IT project. It’s a company-wide transformation that affects various departments. Additionally, the increased dependence on cloud computing can introduce new compliance and security issues to different processes if you’re not looking out for them. In fact, it’s one of the biggest challenges for cloud migration
It isn’t all doom and gloom however – as building with governance in mind, you can make your business more secure, and better prepared to tackle your compliance requirements no matter your industry. Even better, by making use of best practices as a springboard for your migration journey, you can achieve compliance targets quickly that would be unthinkable on premise on an old server.
How to Ensure Cloud Migration Success
There are many worries that assail a business when they’re first considering a cloud migration – often because they are thinking of doing it alone. But a cloud migration doesn’t have to be daunting, with the right team and right track record, you can set the objectives and sit back in peace as the cloud comes to you.
By finding a managed cloud migration service provider, such as ICT Solutions, you can breeze through the process, benefiting from best practices that have successfully gotten thousands of businesses like yours into Azure.
A managed cloud migration partner will assess your organization’s readiness, identify the best migration approach, and provide ongoing support. They’ll go a long way to minimize your migration costs and ensure that you don’t overshoot your budget.
Ready to kickstart your organization’s digital transformation? Schedule a call to evaluate your options and build a robust cloud migration plan.