How to Tackle Six Common Cloud Migration Challenges

As businesses are moving their applications and migrating data to the cloud, they can get overwhelmed by the sheer scope and complexity of the task. After all, they are migrating data and applications that have been in place for years and even decades. Moving data and applications to the cloud carry security risks that must be considered and addressed during the migration process. These include data privacy, compliance, and network security concerns. Companies can easily add or remove resources in response to demand, allowing them to reduce the cost of hardware, software, and personnel needed to support their IT infrastructure.

Having a solid understanding and inventory of your current operations will help to define the scope/impact of your cloud migration. Require multifactor authentication for all administrative access. Enable multifactor authentication for any privileged access to the cloud environment. This will help mitigate common brute-force attacks against administrative accounts. In addition to IAM, the cloud control plane handles various configuration settings that, if improperly managed, could lead to exposure or increased threat surface.

Before a successful migration to the cloud, organizations need to have an understanding of their existing infrastructure and how it will fit into the new cloud environment. This includes knowing which applications and services are being used and which need to be integrated into cloud data migration the cloud. Because of the difficulties involved, outsourcing your cloud migration to a managed service provider will ensure that the migration process will go smoothly. If you have any problems, you’ll have an experienced team to help you solve them in real-time as they appear.

Infrastructure

The best long-term plan is to cultivate cloud skills internally, a strategy that provides several advantages. Although the cloud will ideally make life easier for everyone, the adjustment can still be painful . People may find the new processes confusing, complex, or difficult to integrate.

Cloud migrations can be complex and contain a lot of moving parts. One of the most complex aspects of a migration, especially in a large enterprise, is moving and synchronizing large volumes of data. Another consideration to keep in mind is meeting ongoing performance and availability benchmarks to ensure your RPO and RTO objectives should they change. Setting up open lines of communication and collaboration across your organization, including departments such as IT, legal, and compliance, will help ensure the migration is a success.

It’s important to define specific use cases for the data to create a strong strategy. Quantum computing has lots of potential for high compute applications. This means the underlying pieces of the infrastructure, including the compute elements, hypervisors, storage infrastructure, databases and networking. Even when you don’t prioritize your migration workloads, there can be disruptions resulting in revenue loss. Organizations lose data during migrations due to a lack of DR provisions and then recover it through third-party tools.

Poor Planning and Lack of Skills

Sometimes, on-premises apps and cloud apps link smoothly with zero downtime. Multi-factor authentication should guard all cloud-hosted data. Access should only be available to users with applicable privileges. Decide which data needs additional protection from end-to-end encryption. Move these assets with care after testing the process with non-critical assets. For example, you may create a disaster recovery server on the cloud to store core data in the event of cyber-attacks or natural disasters.

As a software engineer for customer experience with SIOS, I often help companies who are migrating their on-premises high availability clustering environments to the cloud. Business is expected to account for a significant proportion of that volume, but many companies have yet to begin their cloud migration. In late 2021, only 17% of technology leaders surveyed by TELUS International said they had migrated at least half of their current infrastructure to the cloud. Meanwhile, 51% said they anticipated having it done by the end of 2022. Additionally, suppose governments or any other industries have legacy applications that aren’t compatible with a cloud environment.

It allows for a more personalized customer experience, will enable employees to use modern, flexible tools, and contributes significantly to the digital transformation. In-house IT teams have limited skill sets and resources when it comes to handling the rigors of cloud migration. If you’re in an industry where data security compliance standards are high and your IT staff lack proper certifications, you may be putting your business at risk. You’ll also need to find a way to synchronize changes that are made to the source data while the migration is ongoing. Users can access cloud services and data from anywhere, whether they are employees or customers. This contributes to digital transformation, enables an improved experience for customers, and provides employees with modern, flexible tools.

Cloud Security

Turn these on and send the logs to a centralized collector or service for analysis. Use logs to develop cloud behavior baselines and detect security events or incidents. Cloud migrations introduce a much more dynamic pace of change and day-to-day operations. Security teams often scramble to understand what is going on in cloud environments, especially when dealing with a multi-cloud environment.

Every workload element individually migrated should be proven to work in the new environment before migrating another element. The difference here is that the company doesn’t redevelop its own native application from scratch. Cloud providers offer managed services that lower your operational overhead and simplify maintenance tasks such as upgrades.

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Business cases make clear arguments about the benefits of cloud migration, including cost savings and operational improvements. They assess the cost of transitions, considering various options to find the best method. And they compare the total cost of ownership of current arrangements with future cloud operations.

Additionally, organizations should considerhiring cloud migration consultants to ensure that the cloud migration process is executed correctly and efficiently. Security teams must also regularly monitor the cloud environment for potential threats or vulnerabilities that could compromise sensitive data. And create a separate security plan with details about protecting data and compliance that reproduces current data protection measures in the cloud. Finally, companies may completely replace existing apps with cloud-native alternatives. Companies choosing this cloud migration strategy do not need to invest in coding skills. Less time is required to develop cloud-friendly versions of existing tools.

Moving to the cloud has many benefits, including improved speed and time-to-market, enhanced security, and reduced operational costs. Prior to moving to the cloud, companies should evaluate various cloud options that can meet their needs of scalability and elasticity. Many organizations make the mistake of failing to define their cloud strategy. Every business’s cloud migration needs vary, but a detailed cloud migration checklist can go a long way to mitigating issues. A cloud adoption framework provides a baseline for organizations to use when mapping out their cloud migration journey. Discover cloud adoption frameworks by AWS, Microsoft, and Google, which provide a structured path to the cloud including both organizational and technical aspects.

• Again, selecting the cloud service provider that will provide the highest value for the organization’s specific needs is important.
• Each different type of cloud migration has a different set of challenges.
• Identities and role/privilege assignment are critical in the cloud, so dedicate an operational focus on this area.
• He added that some struggle with managing security and compliance across multiple clouds.
• Bill Franklin is currently the VP – Business Development at Threatblockr.

Taking cues from Spotify’s cloud migration journey, you can use small sprints to migrate the entire database to the cloud infrastructure. For example, the engineering teams at Spotify migrated services per week, prioritized as per need basis. Enterprises spend a lot of capital on tweaking their existing infrastructure to be compatible with the cloud environment. Another cloud migration challenge that is related to overall costs is the transfer of massive data and recovery. Cloud migration strategies are roadmaps to the entire process of shifting your assets to the cloud infrastructure. Most of the CTOs face the challenge of choosing an optimal strategy that fits their business requirements.

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It is never easy to build a successful cloud migration strategy and ensure that all the bases are covered. However, if you have the right solution, cloud migration can help you reap the benefits of cloud-based services. So, here is a detailed account of the several cloud migration challenges and practical solutions. Organizations that want to succeed ought to create detailed plans for migrating to a cloud vendor and develop their skill sets to understand the cloud environment better. This should mean aligning cloud migration strategies with overall business goals and exploring options for the choice of cloud providers, system integrators, and any other external resources. This can require significant effort since cloud storage systems often have different architectures and security protocols than traditional on-premises environments.

However, when done well, internal education can help your organization continue moving forward with a successful cloud migration. Financial concerns touch on almost every cloud migration challenge. There’s the immediate cost to make the migration itself in addition to the long-term financial risks of low or slow adoption and training after the migration has occurred. As organizations move to the cloud, data security and regulatory compliance are major concerns. Data and applications hosted on the cloud must be secured at the same level as they are on-prem, and some cloud deployment models are better suited to this than others. The time needed to complete cloud migration can be shortened by breaking their projects into phases and adopting an “incremental” approach.

On-demand access to IT resources allows UAT of HA and DR to expand beyond “shut down the primary node”. Networks can be sabotaged, kernels can be panicked, even databases can be corrupted and none of this will impact production! Identifying and testing these scenarios improves HA and DR posture. For instance, cloud https://globalcloudteam.com/ contact centers enable brands to centralize customer information so that agents don’t have to move between multiple systems and platforms when supporting customers. Additionally, the cloud helps companies scale quickly and with agility, boosting operational efficiency and maximizing productivity in the process.

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It is crucial to put the right personnel in charge and properly equip them with the tools and information necessary to migrate to the cloud successfully. That includes ensuring that all employees are informed about cloud security procedures and best practices and appointing individuals responsible for cloud governance. Finally, organizations must consider whether they have the technical expertise to migrate to the cloud effectively.

Without this knowledge, companies may not be able to address and mitigate these potential issues before they spin out of control and create issues further down the line. You need everyone to collaborate and figure out a cloud strategy and how you intend refactoring as you transition to cloud technology. Here are cloud migration challenges organizations face and possible solutions. Even with such rapid growth, many businesses have yet to realize the full potential of a cloud because migration remains a significant challenge.

Cultural changes

This doesn’t mean you need to make any major overhauls to the code, just updating a few bits here and there to optimize your application. It implies that the developers are in the position to reuse languages, containers, and frameworks that they have invested in. You’ll also need to find a way to synchronize changes made to the source data while the migration is ongoing.

After the migration is finished, we will perform a final review to ensure we have met the project goals and that there are no cloud migration problems. The last step is to decommission the cloud tenant and assist in removing any legacy on-premise components. Our first step in moving to the cloud is to conduct a series of workshops to analyze and review the project scope, goals, and desired business processes. We then map that analysis and design a tailored, automated solution that aligns with the project goals.

The longer the cloud migration process, the greater the cost and impact on the organization. During the intermediate stages of the cloud migration process, infrastructure costs are increased because the business is paying for both on-prem and cloud infrastructure. The speed and smoothness of the cloud migration process depend on the quality and detail of the cloud migration strategy. A non-existent or unclear strategy can result in additional time spent figuring out the process along the way and may result in work needing to be performed multiple times to get them right.