5 Key Cloud Migration Challenges And Their Proven Solutions

Introduction

Migration to the cloud has become the new norm for most IT businesses to achieve digital transformation. Cloud computing has exploded the IT market, which has made the on-premises applications diligently adopt the cloud at a rapid pace. The organizations have goals to digitize and are racing to become runners in the market.

Migrating the applications on the cloud successfully could be a daunting task unless there is a structured migration plan. Without a designed methodology in place, one may get stuck or face a deadlock during the cloud migration process. This may lead to a significant loss of revenue for the organization, sometimes in billions.

Today, we are going to address some of the challenges and risks in migrating to the cloud, the methodology used to overcome these challenges during the implementation process, and the successful outcomes.

So, let us first look at some major challenges and risks involved that organizations go through during the cloud migration process:

1. Assess, Strategize and Plan:

Migrating to the cloud successfully requires micro-level detailing, accurate planning, and a proper team to handle any exceptions encountered during the various phases. Planning out the migration before you jump to the cloud is essential to the core. An estimated time frame must be chalked out since a complete cloud migration process may potentially take several months. The duration depends on the size of the business, the amount of data, and the number of applications that need to be migrated.  The organization needs to assess which cloud to migrate to and then plan and strategize the migration.

2. Financial cost:

Cost /finance always tops the analysis list. But in the long run, cloud migration may yield a good return on investment. However, the road to the fort is still uphill, i.e., it is expensive. Even so, the costs can be minimalized by good preparation and heavy emphasis on the management plan. For the initial stage, migrating to a hybrid cloud will be considered a healthy step.

3. Disaster Recovery:

CDR or cloud disaster recovery is a cloud service that helps you to retrieve your organisation’s lost or damaged data because of any disaster and provides you with a secure and safe virtual environment to your organisation’s system with remote access to it. Cloud-based data backups and clear-cut disaster recovery plans are like insurance policy. They are investments that you hope do not come into play, but if they ever do, you know you will be covered. This provides peace of mind and allows you to focus on driving your business, not fretting over IT issues. CloudThat is well reputed in providing a good data recovery program to organisations that are migrating to or already have migrated to the cloud to mitigate challenges in data cloud security. The data recovery programs might be one of the first steps in securing the long-term future of your organisation.

4. Cloud Consultants/ Cloud Architects to implement solutions:

Not choosing the right consultants and architects can break the backbone of all the preparations an organisation has done. A good consulting partner will not only help in smooth migration but will also ensure the longevity of the company. Contacting a trusted MSP (Managed Service Provider) like CloudThat plays a vital role to overcome the problems which you face during and after the migration. MSPs like CloudThat can act as a valuable resource as they are highly trained in dealing with migration issues.

5. Security Questions:

Organisations fears that hackers or cyber attackers might steal sensitive information during the cloud migration process and exploit the business system. With the upright cloud migration partner like CloudThat, there is no requisite for any agents which means no added security risks: no connections are needed to the workload’s network, no ports are required to be opened, the security system or firewall is compromised and there is no risk of obsolete agent software being exploited by hackers.

Cloud Migration is a done phase-by-phase and is a gradual process. To mitigate the cloud security risks, organizations must follow a step-by-step methodology to achieve seamless migration.

Let us take a closer look at the Cloud Migration Methodology.

Cloud Migration Methodology:

A robust cloud migration methodology helps you to improve reliability and performance, operate more securely, optimize costs, automate security, and focus on core competencies and projects that drive business value worldwide. You should carry out your migration requirements considering key parameters that can transform your business:

Migration Implementation: 

Migration Preparation and Business Planning:

1. Run a migration readiness assessment to facilitate decisions, form a dedicated team as your Cloud Center of Excellence (CCoE)
2. Portfolio Discovery and Planning: Examine the existing infrastructure and compare it to current standards and best practices in security, availability, scalability, infrastructure automation, monitoring, proactive prevention of failures, and disaster recovery.
3. Infrastructure Design: Gather requirements, create logical and network diagrams, and create cloud architecture documents.
4. Automation with proven, innovative cloud technologies, including deep automation with Amazon CloudFormation, Chef, and Docker Kubernetes, etc.
5. Deployment and Validation: Apply iterative methods as each application is design, migrated, and validated to the new cloud production, staging, and test environments.
6. Continuous Improvement: Rigorously monitor and track all functionality at scale and high load.

CloudThat’s vast experience in cloud and data centre technologies brings together a robust model for migration of workloads into public/hybrid clouds with the use of agile methodologies for faster and efficient migrations. This model of the journey of workloads through multiple phases as outlined below is put together in a unified process called “Agile Migration Factory.”

Migration Outcomes:

• Leverage cloud to help transform technology for reduced IT operational costs
• Efficient infrastructure can provide continuous delivery of core services to customer and constituents
• Better manageability of infrastructural cost for resources and services
• Highly secured environment aligned to security compliances to reduce data breach
• Data Center exit and Hardware refresh transformation are expected results

Conclusion:

Cloud migration is undoubtedly a complex and vital step for any organisation. It involves lots of capital, risks of data exposure and not to forget high hopes of the company’s future. There is a risk involved during the migration as the security encryption is lowered and reinforced later. So, during the process, the security posture can be vulnerable and unstable which could lead to potential adversaries.

It needs a proper investment of time and should not be done without thorough planning and research. Depending upon the company and organisations, the challenges may vary, nonetheless, the above mentioned are unavoidable. It is like playing minesweeper as one does not know beforehand what issues await. With the right service provider and proper preparation, one can easily surf through the problems. Sometimes, it is better to choose a third-party vendor to manage your cloud migration. To reduce internal burden, close the skill gap and follow procedures, protocols, and compliance, choosing the right team is prevalent.

To get started, go through our Expert Advisory page and Managed Services Package that are CloudThat’s offerings. You can easily get in touch with our highly accomplished team of experts to carry out your migration needs. CloudThat is Microsoft Gold Partner, AWS Advanced Consulting Partner, and a Google Cloud Partner and has successfully led many migration projects for our esteemed clients. Get in touch with us for quick results.
Feel free to drop a comment or any queries that you have regarding cloud migration, and we will get back to you quickly.