Is your organization planning to move to the cloud? Cloud computing is gaining utmost importance over the past decades. With the increased number of cloud service providers, cloud adoption is on a high rise. According to business insiders, businesses waste $62B in unused datacentre capacity every year. Business and professional service companies spend over 62% of their annual IT budget on internal maintenance. This is the reason why there is tremendous growth observed over the past few years.

Many of the technology experts say “Cloud is an experience, not just a space to dump your workloads”. Now let’s look into the features that make the cloud an experience, the following are some of those.

• Utility-based/consumption-based pricing
• Orchestration/automation
• Self-service
• On-demand services/applications
• Scalability, agility, and efficiency
• The app you need when you need it
• YES to innovation
• YES to new technology

However, before your organization makes the jump, there is a need for a detailed migration plan.  To dig deeper into cloud migration plan read our blog on "Cloud Readiness Assessment Checklist to Simplify Your Journey to the Cloud"

Effectively migrating to the cloud, needs loads of attention. If your organization isn’t ready to agitate the challenges of cloud migration, then it can be pricey and risky for you and your data. However, understanding these challenges and the way to agitate them before you begin your cloud journey can provide you with an enormous advantage.

The Top 5 Challenges of Cloud Migration:

Cloud Migration Plan

IT professionals understand that you just can’t blindly adopt a brand new technology into your infrastructure without an intact cloud migration plan or strategy. A cloud migration strategy doesn’t simply embody selecting the correct cloud service provider for your business, however. You have to consider cost analysis, the time required to complete the migration process, and the employee training. Depending on the size of your organization's data, the migration process will take a long time. Not having a proper migration plan will drive your organization in an ambiguous state on what to be migrated.

Following are the few takeaways on “what to migrate”:

• Internet-facing applications
• Cloud-native applications
• Elastic applications
• Critical applications with availability & scalability concerns
• Apps without dependencies
• Or perhaps not apps, but services like data: protection / DR instead

1. Splitting up cloud migration into stages

The worst factor you'll presumably do once it involves cloud migration is an attempt to move everything onto the cloud promptly. Whereas businesses are keen to migrate their information to the cloud, they have to prioritize which data or application to be moved first. Migrating non-essential or redundant data first is the best practice that you can adopt while migrating to the cloud. This practice can be used to test how cloud migration suits your organization's operational model. You can analyze the employee behavior in handling the data moved to the cloud so that you will not risk your organization's critical data, particularly if you wish to keep up compliance.

2. Understanding the Costs of Cloud Migration

Migrating to the cloud might be costly, particularly if you don’t analyze the possible financial impact beforehand. Cost-effectiveness is one of the major reasons for organizations migrating to the cloud, the parallel cost is the biggest challenge during the cloud migration. Yes, though the cloud is a cost-effective solution in the long-term, failing to assess the upfront costs turns to be expensive for your organization.

Cloud Economics is one such concept which helps you regulate the unnecessary costs and makes your cloud journey a real value add for your organization. To know more on cloud Economics read our blog

When accessing the financial cost, you should not only consider the cost of using the cloud solutions, rather it is very important to access various other costs such as training employees on the new technology and the cost of rewriting or replacing data to be compatible with the cloud architecture.

The following are the few takeaways that can help you in understanding and managing the cloud costs:

• Utility-based pricing model
• Use cost calculators
• Consider 3rd party tools
• Audit what you have now!
• Consider indirect costs
• Consider show/charge-back

3. Cloud Security

Security is often the biggest barrier that stops organizations from adopting the cloud. It’s always good for organizations to be on top of security, particularly when adopting new technologies. Migrating to the cloud literally means putting all your critical assets and data on a cloud provider’s servers which you even don’t where they are located. This is the major concern why some of the organizations still prefer to be On-Premise. However, most of the cloud service providers are offering a high-end security model and are even proven to be more secure than an On-Premises environment.

“Over 90% of the businesses across the world find enhancement in their security, after migrating to cloud. Cloud providers offer robust security mechanism for the organizations, it offers better control on data access, as it strictly restricts unauthorized user access.”

4. Training Employees on your Cloud Solutions

Failing to train all the employees who are supposed to have hands-on newer technologies, will bring in a devastating loss to your organization in terms of data loss. Yes, if not trained well employees may unknowingly erase data or they might duplicate it or they may expose the data to intruders. That is why you must ensure to have training sessions for all the employees beforehand, you should not be in an assumption that they will learn on their own once the applications are deployed on the cloud. A special training and support team must help the employees in understanding the new technology and to support them while using the cloud.

5. Avoiding Cloud Vendor Lock-in

Vendor lock-in is something that doesn’t look like a challenge in the beginning, as your initial expectations for cloud vendors will be positive. But in a long run, at some point in time, you may find your vendor isn’t working for you. Vendor lock-in is a common problem for most organizations who adopt cloud technology; as the process of shifting data from one cloud to another is a very tedious and costly process. For this reason, most of the organizations will continue with the same vendor even if it is not the best fit for them. While choosing cloud service providers, it is mandatory to look for a vendor that can precisely deliver the services as per your cloud goals. Here SLAs (service-level agreements) play a crucial role, you must carefully curate the terms, this will help you in terminating the services with the vendor when it is not working for you.