Organizations on the road to digital transformation have cloud migration as a top priority on their bucket list. Post-2020, cloud adoption numbers have shot up, with reports suggesting that the pandemic contributed a $1.5 billion boost to the cloud, software, and platform-as-a-service sectors through the third quarter of 2020.

Although the cloud offers exceptional enterprise-grade security, scalability, and availability, migrating to the cloud is not just about moving a handful of workloads. It requires careful planning, substantial time and effort, the right budget, and expert support for maximum results.

Challenges to be wary of

Cloud migration, although a critical business priority today, is complex. It demands thorough planning, a robust roadmap, and a qualified team of experts who know what it takes to ensure successful migration – with minimum risks and costs.

Let’s look at some challenges organizations that embark on the cloud migration journey end up facing:

  • Limited or no top management appreciation of the scale of the task. This leads to less support and a meager budget that does not take into consideration the costs of hiring an expert, implementing new systems, rearchitecting old ones, supporting and maintaining cloud workloads, training users, and more
  • Using a one-size-fits-all cloud migration strategy not knowing what data and which apps to migrate and which not to
  • A poorly defined cloud migration roadmap that does not cater to the IT infrastructure needs or align with the business goals
  • An ill-equipped team of in-house experts with little or no experience in overcoming bottlenecks and downtime
  • A lack of the right tools or methodologies required for successful migration outcomes
  • Legacy internet connections that make the migration process long and grueling
  • Little or no insight into which data is important, what apps need to be moved, and what systems need to be modernized for cloud success
  • Poor alignment between IT and business teams
  • Resistance from employees coupled with the incongruence of roles and responsibilities and blurred accountability
  • Not choosing the right partner who understands the nuances of complex migration processes, issue resolution, and best practices

What to migrate and what not to

Cloud migration, although extremely advantageous, is not a magic wand for all organizational problems. Expecting the cloud to fix existing loopholes such as data security, application issues, or frequent outages will inevitably cause less-than-optimal systems, which will only be made worse by increasing risk and costs – without improving performance or data quality.

While deciding to migrate to the public cloud, it is important to determine which apps, tools, and data will be best suited for a cloud environment and which won’t. Here’s what you should and shouldn’t migrate to the public cloud:

  • Don’t move apps with high security and compliance requirements: If you are worried about the loss of control or security risks of moving your data to the cloud, it’s best to continue hosting critical data and systems on-premises, or in a private cloud. Having such data in-house can give you more control while also allowing you to implement the required levels of security and governance to safeguard it against attacks and misuse.
  • Move collaboration apps: With the hybrid work model becoming a global phenomenon, organizations can benefit greatly by moving collaboration apps to the cloud. Such migration can pave the way for seamless, anytime, anywhere communication, file, and data sharing, thus ensuring better operations and quicker accomplishment of goals.
  • Don’t move complex legacy tools: Existing tools that are either too proprietary or too complex for the cloud environment are best left as-is. Although the cloud provides some level of future-proofing, if you don’t see any value in moving the application to the cloud or if you think the application would need substantial rearchitecting or recoding to operate in the cloud, sunsetting it might be the best option.
  • Move systems that need high availability and scalability: The cloud offers exceptional disaster recovery and business continuity capabilities; hence, systems that need high availability are best suited for the cloud. At the same time, since the cloud supports scaling that traditional data centers cannot support, apps and systems that need to seamlessly scale up or down based on demand can also benefit greatly from the cloud.
  • Don’t move highly customized systems: Highly customized systems, applications with high dependencies, and environments with technical debt can become difficult to manage and operate in the cloud, resulting in higher costs. To ensure the same level of functionality of such apps, it makes more sense to rebuild them again in the cloud using codeless or microservices-based tools.

With the global cloud computing market size expected to grow to $832.1 billion by 2025, it’s time to prepare for the big move. Since migrating to the cloud is a massive undertaking, you need to embark on the journey with extreme planning and precision. To get the best returns from your efforts, make sure to be aware of the challenges and carefully choose apps and systems that would benefit the most from a cloud environment for sustained growth and success. Talk to experts like Trinus to get your cloud migration journey off to the right start.