In today’s day and age, organizations worldwide are moving their applications and data to the cloud. With the vast amount of data at their disposal, it becomes impossible to store, process, and manage it through on-premise and traditional data centers. Although on-premise data storage has its advantages, they have minimal data storing capabilities that organizations can’t compromise on in today’s business environment. Due to these reasons, business owners have started adopting cloud computing technology.
Here is the proof of that:
- The public cloud service market’s worth will become $623.3 billion by 2023.
- As per the CIO survey, the total workload of on-premise dropped from 59% in 2019 to 38% in 2021. At the same time, cloud adoption increased from 23% to 35%.
- The annual spending on cloud resources by the U.S. Government was $6.8 billion in 2020. It will become $7.3 billion in 2021 and $7.8 billion in 2022.
All these statistics indicate one major trend: the adoption of cloud resources will rise year by year. So, business owners need to know the cloud migration process. They also need to understand how they make the cloud migration process seamless and for that purpose, they need to be aware of the most common cloud migration mistakes. Taking this into account, here we will discuss six unforgivable cloud migration mistakes that everyone makes. It will help you avail a checklist that you can touch upon before starting the migration process.
1. Lack of Strategy
The first thing you should do is formulate a strategy for the cloud migration process. Organizations often mistake not having a clear plan of migrating their applications, data, and resources to the cloud. There is no one-size-fits-all approach in cloud migration, and therefore, it has become essential for organizations to develop their plans. The reason is that each organization has a different size of infrastructure and volume of data you need to transfer. Keeping that in mind, you need to formulate the strategy. Lastly, you also need to decide the cloud model you want to adopt, such as public cloud, private cloud, hybrid cloud, or multi-cloud.
2. Migrating All Data at Once
If you carefully analyze the successful cloud migration lessons from various experts, you would find that they wouldn’t recommend migrating all the data in a single phase. Cloud migration is a process that can take months or even years to complete, and you should always do it in stages. Create an estimated timeline of how much and what data you need to migrate in one phase and perform the migration plan. If you migrate all the data at once and anything goes wrong, you won’t recover your data. So, prioritize the business-sensitive data and migrate that first. Also, always conduct the test of migrated data to make sure you’re application is working correctly.
3. Changing Vendors Unnecessarily
One of the fatal cloud migration mistakes business owners make during cloud migration is changing vendors without any concrete reason. Cloud migration experiences of top organizations suggest that you should stick with one vendor. For example, if you want to migrate your data from the private cloud to the public cloud due to insufficient storage, sticking to the original vendor would make your job easier. They would figure out a way to migrate the data without hassle. Also, if you stick with one vendor, they would have detailed knowledge about the ecosystem and take appropriate decisions in case of any security or compliance issues.
4. Forgetting About Network
One of the core lessons learned from cloud migration is that you should always think about networks in addition to the hardware and software. People talk about software and hardware in cloud migration but often forget the role of the network. Without having a standard network, it would be impossible to access your resources. Therefore, you need to study the security and performance-related issues that can arise with a particular network. Based on these detailed studies, you need to pick the right network provider for the cloud migration process. If you don’t give much importance to this aspect, it becomes challenging to access vast data seamlessly.
5. Faulty Budgeting
Cost and return on investment are considered the biggest benefits of cloud adoption. However, that is a misconception altogether. Some affordable and cheap cloud solutions are available, for none is comprehensive that a large-scale business can reap benefits from. Therefore, it becomes essential for business owners to give importance to budgeting while migrating to the cloud. If you don’t plan it well in terms of time and budget, you could end up spending a hefty amount on the whole process. Therefore, make sure you analyze the time and cost requirements before starting the cloud migration process for your organization.
6. Not Configuring Data and Apps for Cloud
When you’re planning to migrate your applications and data to any cloud platform, you need to configure and make them ready according to the cloud environment. You can’t just put all the resources as it is in the cloud and hope that the application will function properly. That’s not going to happen at all. Therefore, you should test your application and data in a simulated cloud environment before starting the migration process. It would give you an idea of where you stand in terms of performance. For example, if you’re running the app in the cloud, you might require more computing power than your provider provides you. Therefore, check that aspect properly.
Wrapping Up Things
Cloud migration is not as easy as it sounds. You need to be meticulous about everything related to the cloud migration process to have a successful outing. In this blog, we have touched upon the six cloud migration mistakes that commonly occur. When migrating your resources to the cloud, it will help you know where things can go wrong to plan for that aspect in advance. What are the other mistakes that often happen during cloud migration? OR What are the mistakes you have made during cloud migration? Do let us know your thoughts in the comments section. Thank you.!
