Cloud Migration Expectation Vs Reality

Cloud migration has created quite a buzz in recent years for businesses to thrive, cloud is truly become a requirement for laying the foundation for innovation. Cloud is a key enabler for achieving greater scalability while reducing a lot of operational and infrastructural costs. As per a recent report produced by Accenture, it is evident that most of the industry experts today are falling short of estimating the complexity of migrating their applications to the cloud, as they do not have a clear picture of what to expect from a cloud provider and what do they get.

Though almost 70 percent of organizations have a presence in the cloud with at least one application or a part of their infrastructure in the cloud, only a few of these organizations have attained their predictable cloud outcomes. During the time of implementation or after the cloud migration is done, organizations will realize the gap in expectation and reality.

Although organizations are increasingly faster at implementing new technology, many fail to effectively plan for the obstacles they may face during the journey. IT experts and technology leaders need to do a collaborative effort to deliver successful cloud migration.

Realistic view on costs of cloud migration

Expectation: Low Cost

Cost is one of the major aspects where organizations fail to access it beforehand, they find the cloud to be a cost-effective solution and proceed to migrate their workloads.

Reality: “Low Cost “only when planned well and with proper cloud economics in place

Migrating to the cloud can turn out to be costly when the financial impact is not analyzed and understood before migrating to the cloud.

Most organizations think that they can drastically reduce their infrastructure cost by just moving to the cloud, but they tend to forget about analyzing the hidden costs. This may lead to the huge gap between expectation and reality. Cloud Economics is very important for organizations to regulate unnecessary costs. To know more on cloud Economics read our blog.

That is why organizations need to set the expectations right!

The following are the few tips that can help organizations in managing the cloud costs:

• Must evaluate utility-based pricing model
• Make use of cost calculators
• 3rd party tools can help to effectively understand cost
• Conducting an audit on the available resources
• Evaluate hidden or  indirect costs

Cloud security and compliance:

While adopting any new technology, security is a top most priority. However to many organizations, migrating to the cloud means lifting and shifting entire data to the cloud, here the cloud providers bear the responsibility of securing the organizations data.

Expectation:

Unlike On-Premises infrastructure, organizations do not have operational control on the data, which in turn creates vulnerability to external security and privacy threats, however GDPR (General Data Protection Regulation) and various other data management regulations have strict guidelines for cloud service providers for maintaining privacy and security for the organizations data stored in cloud. Cloud service providers have to bare greater penalties, in case of theft, misuse, and abuse of customer data.

Reality:

Relying completely on the cloud service provider is not a good idea for organizations to ensure robust security for their data. Organizations must thoroughly understand the ever-evolving threat landscape and must develop a dedicated cloud security strategy from the outset. This will help them balance the migration to a cloud infrastructure while ensuring their assets are secure. Not only threat protection, implementing swift breach detection and remediation helps organizations to drastically reduce the time cybercriminals can spend in the environment and the damage they can do.

Managing Skill gap and Training employees

The skill gap is something that organizations cannot ignore during cloud migration. Most of the organizations realize this gap during the migration process. Expertise support is very much needed throughout the process of architecting, managing, securing, and migration.

Expectation:

Though few organizations surpass the migration process without realizing the skill gap, they will identify this gap once the project has already commenced. Organizations assume that their employees will easily adopt the cloud environment, with minimal guidance or on their own, once the applications are deployed.

Reality:

A cloud expert or a trusted third party helps businesses to fully accelerate the value of the cloud. The skills gap not only increases the time-to-value of cloud applications, it also influences the end-user experience, disrupts business operations, and may cause financial damage. Employee training plays a crucial role in a successful cloud journey, without proper knowledge of cloud infra, they may unknowingly expose critical data, and this may leave organizations to face devastating data loss.

Cloud vendor lock-in

At the beginning of the cloud migration process, vendor lock-in doesn’t seem like an issue nor will the organizations think of it.

Expectation:

Organizations will have a positive view of the cloud service provider initially. Most businesses tend to stick with one CSP just because they cannot bear the expense of moving from one CSP to another. Based on the current cloud goals business will lock in a vendor, expecting them to deliver the services as per their growing business needs.

Reality:

When choosing cloud service providers, organizations need to look for a vendor that can precisely deliver the services as per their cloud goals. Here SLAs (service-level agreements) have to be curated with utmost care so that all the terms and conditions are mentioned and understood. This will help organizations in terminating the services with the vendor when it is not working for them.

Locuz Can Help:

With years of domain knowledge and expertise, we can help you navigate through the pitfalls and help you realize the full potential of cloud adoption. We can help you put together a Cloud Migration strategy that is Business-Ready. By “Business-Ready”, we mean that your organization can feel confident that it can run any mix of business applications within this framework and know that it can evolve as your business/application needs change over time.