Best Practices
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Top 7 Cloud Migration Challenges & How To Overcome Them
11th August, 2023
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Cloud migration can help your organization become more agile, efficient, and competitive in today's rapidly evolving business landscape. While cloud migration may involve some challenges, you, as an IT manager, must face them to reap the many benefits of cloud computing.
Organizations are shifting to cloud environments as it offers more scalability and flexibility than on-premise solutions. However, several IT managers often decide to move to the cloud without a proper strategy, which later on becomes a challenge to deal with and disrupts their entire flow of work. But we don’t want you to do that. Thus, it is crucial for you to understand that migrating critical data and applications to the cloud requires careful planning and deliberation.
For instance, the lift and shift model, app modernization and refactoring, and re-platforming are all popular methods of cloud migration, and each one has its place in migration strategy. From these, the lift-and-shift approach may be the fastest and least destructive method; it may not work for all mission-critical and proprietary applications.
So what do you need to do as an IT manager? You need to carefully analyze your current infrastructure and business objectives thoroughly to choose the right cloud migration method. This is one of the solutions that IT managers can implement, but there are other ways as well.
So we will go into detail in this blog about the common challenges one can encounter and solutions to mitigate them.
Top 7 Cloud Migration Challenges (+Solutions)
Cloud migration can be a complex and challenging process, requiring careful planning and execution to ensure that IT operations are not disrupted. However, you can mitigate those challenges by implementing effective strategies or solutions.
Below are a few common challenges businesses encounter, plus solutions to tackle them.
1. Choosing the Appropriate Cloud Services
Choosing the right cloud service is an important challenge of cloud migration. It involves assessing the organization's specific needs and selecting the cloud service that best meets your IT team’s needs.
For instance, if an organization requires high-performance computing resources, it may choose a cloud service that specializes in high-performance computing, such as Amazon Web Services (AWS), Elastic Compute Cloud (EC2), or Microsoft Azure High-Performance Computing.
Another example could be an organization that requires a cloud service that offers strong data security and compliance features. Here, it may choose a cloud service that complies with industry standards, such as the health insurance portability and accountability act (HIPAA).
One such cloud service could be Google Cloud Platform, which offers HIPAA-compliant services for healthcare organizations.
Besides selecting the right cloud service, you, as an IT Manager, also need to consider factors such as data migration, data storage, and data backup and recovery when migrating to the cloud. It is crucial to choose a cloud service that provides the necessary tools and features to support these functions and to ensure data security and compliance.
Ultimately, selecting the right cloud service requires careful consideration of your organization's and IT team’s specific goals and needs and a thorough evaluation of the available options.
2. Maintaining Data Security
When does data security come into the picture? When your data starts transitioning from physical servers to the cloud is when it's most vulnerable. Data can be exposed to cyberattacks during shifting from on-premises to cloud environments, leading to serious monetary or reputational damage.
So how are you supposed to guard the data upon cloud migration? The feasible way to deal with it is to implement certain strategies to protect the data from potential security risks.
Such as, you can opt for security as a service that helps your team reduce security risks. Furthermore, many cloud providers offer tools with efficient security features to help your IT team with data security. Also, you can go beyond such features and collaborate with cloud vendors to develop security as a service.
3. Prioritizing Problems
What prioritizing means in cloud migration? It is the process of identifying critical components and services that need to be migrated first or prioritized. It is done to ensure zero downtime.
For example, to maintain the IT operation flow, your IT teams need to shift those SaaS applications first, which are required on a priority basis for IT operation completion.
Another example is that your teams need to protect those sensitive data first, which have a high chance of getting impacted and are more vulnerable during the migration process. Upon reviewing the above scenario, it is apparent that your IT teams are facing issues in terms of prioritizing the migration of SaaS apps, data, or IT assets.
What to do in such a situation? Your team can use an alignment strategy which will help them collect data elements and create a ranking for each application to prioritize.
Further, your team can conduct a pre-migration assessment to help understand business metrics and align the obtained data elements. After brainstorming with all stakeholders and management, these metrics will help prioritize which application or data needs to be migrated first.
4. Cloud migration cost
Many organizations have limited budgets, so optimizing them to the fullest is crucial. That's one of the reasons why several IT managers want to shift to the cloud, as it helps them cut costs. However, they fail to see the other side.
Cloud migration can be costly, as large numbers of data, apps, and more are being shifted from one physical environment to a cloud environment.
IT managers also encounter cloud migration costs challenges due to compatibility issues, lack of a properly skilled IT team, and at times wrong migration strategy. Further, they have to invest in inefficient tools and methods to migrate, but when they fail to serve the purpose, the cost invested in the process goes to waste entirely.
IT managers have to spend a good amount of capital on their existing infrastructure in order to be compatible with the cloud environment, like upgrading systems to support SaaS apps or cloud services.
When your SaaS app data is lost during the migration process due to a lack of data recovery provisions, to retrieve those crucial data, IT managers need to take help from a third party which will additionally involve costs.
The best way to overcome this challenge is to make a budget strategy and ensure it syncs with your business requirements. You must understand that cloud migration costs depend on your project scalability and specific needs, so you must plan and prioritize accordingly. Every cloud migration service's pricing structure varies; analyze which services fit your IT teams and opt for that one instead of investing everything in one go.
Additionally, to avoid spending on retrieving lost data, you can provision data recovery services or tools from cloud vendors.
5. Shortage of adequate skill
Cloud computing is a rapidly evolving technology requiring specialized skills and knowledge to design, implement, and manage cloud-based systems effectively. Organizations lacking the expertise and resources may struggle with cloud migration, as IT teams may not know how to design and implement cloud-based solutions that can streamline the migration process.
So the optimal decision you can make to mitigate this challenge is to consider investing in cloud training programs and hiring professionals with experience in cloud computing. You can also partner with cloud service providers offering migration services, support, and consulting services to help your IT team plan and execute cloud migration strategies.
Additionally, you can leverage cloud-based tools and services that require minimal technical expertise, such as SaaS apps, to simplify the cloud adoption process.
6. Migrating large databases
IT managers choose cloud migration to solve the data storage issue and the need for scalability and flexibility. However, they face a problem migrating large volumes of data. Deciding whether to migrate all data at once or to distribute it into small portions and then migrate them one at a time.
Apart from that, IT managers also need to consider other factors such as network bandwidth, data security, and data integrity. They need to ensure that the data is transferred securely and that there is minimal downtime during the migration process. This can be especially challenging when dealing with mission-critical applications that require continuous uptime.
To overcome this challenge, your IT teams can plan small sprints to migrate the entire database to the cloud infrastructure. This will be more secure as you can keep track of small volumes of data than larger ones. For example, the engineering team at Spotify faced the same issue and migrated 50-70 services per week.
7. Downtime
According to Gartner, 1 minute of downtime can cost around $5,500 for an organization. Cloud migration process downtime might take hours, days, or even months, this costs a lot of money. Hence IT managers are afraid to make such expensive decisions like cloud infrastructure migration.
They opt for expensive options, like expanding the on-premises infrastructure and purchasing expensive technical equipment for data storage, because of fear of losing crucial data.
However, they need to realize that migrating large amounts of data and applications to the cloud requires appropriate network services. As one of the biggest risks is a network outage. The interruption can cause irretrievable data loss if there is no adequate backup.
A potential solution is creating a backup IT environment to house and run applications until the migration is complete. It is common for temporary servers to be unable to handle high user loads.
It is better to manage user workloads and proactively inform users of limited capacity and even the occasional application unavailability.
Live migration is also a solution, it means that cloud migration continues while the business is still running. There is no need to hinder the work and put the IT operations on hold.
Now you have a better understanding of the challenges you and your team can come across and how to overcome them. But, you need to note that cloud migration challenges are different for every organization, and no single solution will work for all. So strategizing is the key to cloud migration.
It is crucial to recognize the potential risk and obstacles and create a proper strategic plan to manage them. With proper planning and evaluation, your IT teams can navigate the complexities of the cloud and gain the benefits of cloud-based IT operations.
However, you can also opt for an efficient SaaS management tool that can help you streamline cloud migration and avoid all the hassle of dealing with the challenges.
Zluri: Empowering Seamless Cloud Migration
What is Zluri? How will it help you with cloud migration? Zluri is a SaaS management platform offering various functionalities to streamline cloud migration for organizations. It provides exceptional SaaS buying capabilities that make it easier for IT managers to manage and optimize their cloud infrastructure.
With Zluri’s SaaS buying capabilities, your procurement teams can negotiate with the vendors for the tools that help streamline the migration process and obtain it at the best offer. Before onboarding the new application with Zluri ,your IT teams can verify whether the application is secure enough to deploy by checking the threat levels, risk score, compliance, and more.
This way, your team can protect your organization’s sensitive data from security and compliance risks.
Well, Zluri has more to offer. It plans your budget by identifying your business's existing capital, predicted revenue, and estimated expenses. In this way, you can optimize your budget during cloud migration.
Apart from that, with Zluri, you can prioritize which assets or crucial data need to be migrated first as per the business metrics. Accordingly, your team can shift those applications or data which is required as a top priority to avoid any disruption in operations. Furthermore, to prevent data loss during the migration process due to cyberattacks or data breaches, it helps you retrieve lost data with data recovery capabilities.
Now you know what difference this tool can make, so book a demo and see for yourself what else it offers which can benefit your business.
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