Cloud Migrations

“Lessons learnt from analytical observations not only makes your growth curve steeper by reducing the learning time but also helps you in efficient execution of plans”. This holds true for a cloud migration project as well. As per a Nutanix survey report 85% of the respondents moved or were planning to move nearly half of their workloads back to on premise datacenters after failing to achieve their anticipated ROI on cloud. In this article, we will take a deep dive on possible mistakes and pitfalls one should be aware of before undertaking a cloud migration project and measures which should be taken for a successful cloud migration journey.

• Inadequate Planning –

Gram Bell once said, “Before anything else preparation is the key to success”. This holds true for your cloud migration journey. As cloud migration is a big project the implementation plan may need revamping or tweaking as you move along. For it to happen you need to have an exhaustive migration plan in place first. Each business use case varies from another in one way or another. So instead of following a general approach, a thorough analysis of your use case needs to be done to determine what parts of your infrastructure you want to move to cloud. Take measures to make sure you do not miss any dependency as that can take your cloud migration project downhill in future.

• Adopting a wrong migration approach –

Cloud migration is more of a blanket term. A business can follow various paths to achieve the migration outcome. Though “Lift and shift” approach seems most convenient and cost effective in short term but does not fit to all use cases. After the migration many businesses realize that they are not able to leverage the flexibility, elasticity, auto-scalability advantages cloud provides because of the way their application architecture is designed. Failure to forecast after migration operational costs, handling of transient communication failures also makes many businesses to redeploy certain workloads. Detailed information on the common migration strategies can be found here. So, before launching a cloud migration project, one should make sure to workout the best options for their applications, timelines and business long-term needs.

• Knowledge gap between C-Level executives –

In many cases it has been observed that the C-Level executives other than CIO/CTO fails to fully grasp the value or implications of a cloud migration project. This leads to a lax attitude towards the cloud migration project and the projects fails to get strategic support needed on various phases. Sometimes the successful migration of a certain component is perceived as if the organisation has become cloud ready. It creates a rift between IT and business and derails the cloud migration. A unified vision and strategy from the whole management is must for a successful migration journey and it is duty of the project initiators to create awareness among all executive members, so they in a state to comprehend the complexity as well as benefits of the migration project.

• Talent crunch –

It is one of the most significant reasons which makes a cloud migration project go haywire. The existing IT staff may be cognizant of compute and storage, but they lack the clarity about designing, implementation and operation of cloud models. It is imperative for an organisation to do a skill gap assessment to know what skills they have on hand and which ones are essential for cloud migration. This helps in drafting a plan to bridge this gap. It can be a promising idea to loop in good cloud consulting providers to help you discover this.

• Failure to identify cloud-specific risks –

Migration to cloud brings in modern technologies, network interfaces, processes and third-party business relationships. Many organisations fail to give due consideration to industry specific compliance requirements and modifications required of risk management framework. Negligence on these aspects can lead to IT, legal and cyber-security risks. A holistic risk assessment should be conducted to take risk-based decisions, modify risk management framework and upgrade the operating model. Cloud awareness programs should be conducted for the internal staff to instil best practices for the cloud usage.