Top Challenges When Businesses Migrate to Cloud

Although there are many benefits for businesses migrating to Cloud (Read: Why Business are moving to cloud),there are also many challenges that businesses have to overcome. Successfully migrating to the Cloud requires a lot of attention from your business. If your business is not prepared to handle the challenges of Cloud migration, then it could be costly and dangerous for you and your data. However, knowing about these challenges and how to handle them before you start your Cloud migration will give you a big advantage. Below, we have listed the top 5 challenges that businesses faced during Cloud migration to help you jump-start your process.

Security The first question that most businesses have is about security of data. Will my data be secured in the Cloud and how? Valid question. Moving an on-premise server/database to the Cloud can bring about more issues if the migration is not planned and handled correctly. Cloud environments will expose your data to additional threats given the ever-increasing cyber-attack frequency and sophistication.This is where enhanced security and proven practices must be utilized to work along with Cloud technologies. The challenge today is allowing businesses to profit from the Public Cloud without completely becoming exposed to the risks associated. Businesses need to consider and properly plan your security strategy to accommodate every increasing security concern as you migrate to the Cloud.

Cost

Moving to the Cloud can be costly, especially if you don’t forecast the potential financial impact accurately in advance or plan your required resources properly. While Cloud is often more cost-effective in the long term, Cloud migration might be expensive upfront depending on how much data your business plans to migrate.

Most Cloud Providers like Amazon Web Services (AWS) and Microsoft Azure for example offer pricing calculators to help estimate the costs associated with setting up resources in the Cloud for businesses. You can enter the details of your business’ on-premise workloads and this information will be used to understand the Total Cost of Ownership (TCO) and recommended services. This is just one of the many ways public Cloud providers enable organizations to manage and optimize their costs.Nowadays, most Cloud platforms can cater to all infrastructure, networking and security needs, and giving businesses complete visibility and control of your Cloud environment. This helps to reduce the number of 3rd party vendor agreements and further reducing CAPEX costs due to little to no new hardware required to set up. With Cloud, businesses can start small and scale their resources in a highly flexible and cost-effective way.

   Business Continuity

During the migration to Cloud, critical applications may be inaccessible or less functional than what your staff might have come to expect. This downtime can lead to frustration among your staff and customers, as well as less efficiency and higher operating costs.There are some best practices that you can follow to keep your processes running smoothly during Cloud migrations. First, you should always try to move applications and their related data together to keep them from getting separated in the new environment. Then, depending on how much downtime your business can handle, you’ll need to pick a suitable migration strategy. Some businesses use the hybrid approach to ensure businesses receive uninterrupted services during deployments and migrations.

Legacy Apps

One of the biggest challenges is to connect legacy systems with newer Cloud-based business applications. For your short-term to mid-term plans, you will require solutions that can operate in a hybrid environment, along with services from vendors that can support a company’s migration to the Cloud.

People & Processes

The biggest challenge for Cloud adoption is not about the technology. It is the people and processes that must be properly adjusted and trained to be able to operate on the Cloud platform. This takes time, limiting the effectiveness of Cloud adoption. Smaller and younger businesses will make this transition easier and the bigger businesses will have a long tail of transition when it comes to full Cloud adoption.