6 Common Challenges to Cloud Migration

Businesses are changing today. Cloud is gaining popularity every day. With the onset of covid 19, many organizations have shifted to a remote working environment to maintain social distances and this has all the more pushed organizations to move their operations to the cloud. This is a major opportunity for companies to expand their functioning systems and increase their businesses globally. But only for those who were ready to change!

Companies have been promoting this shift to Cloud Migration for a while now. On average, 73.8 million dollars is invested in Cloud investments out of the total IT budget annually.

With the continuous movement to cloud:

–      Operations and management experience increased efficiency

–      Distributed workforce has better support and access 

–      IT tech stack enabled with better integration

–      Cost reduction

However, the journey of making this digital shift to the cloud has not been easy. Companies have faced major setbacks. Organizations today have remote workers, multiple offices, and numerous computing tools and platforms to work on. This requires effective planning and execution from the management to ensure the smooth functioning of their existing systems in the future.

Moving to the cloud, though beneficial, is not a cakewalk, for sure. It has its own set of challenges. This write-up will walk you through the challenges that companies suffer while moving their systems to the cloud. Read along to avoid making these mistakes and be better prepared to upgrade your company systems and explore better opportunities in the future.

Challenge 1: Performance

Performance is a major concern for over a majority of experts while moving their applications and processes to the cloud. They fear this move may reduce their company efficiency and impact their processes. The major reasons for this include resistance to change and a poor understanding of the functioning processes.  

In research by the IHS market on the Bi-Directional Cloud Highway in 2019, when asked by hundreds of developers and industry experts, around 74% said they had moved an application into the cloud and then moved it back into their own infrastructure. When asked about their reasons for this move, the top two responses were performance and security.

Most respondents approve that the applications they shift back to their company systems are the ones they moved as a part of their planned temporary cloud deployment. These are applications that were shifted because of a temporary transition in the processes that occurred because of a merger or acquisition and were moved back to the system once the processes normalized.

Challenge 2: Security

The second crucial challenge in the process of cloud migration, Security comes as a major concern for a lot of experts while moving their systems to the cloud. This confusion occurs when companies do not have clarity over who should bear the burden of ensuring proper security in the company systems. In the same IHS market study, respondents have voted for cost and security as their major reasons to resist their movement to the cloud. 

Challenge 3: Financial cost

Tough shifting your processes to the cloud can result in increased efficiency, lower admin cost and streamlined processes, the costs involved in every single step of migration are collectively huge. These costs include:

• Rewriting application architecture for the cloud
• Manpower hiring and Technology cost 
• Training cost
• Performance issues 
• Bandwidth costs

Any move towards the cloud requires experienced professionals to be hired. In a survey conducted by IDG, 67% of organizations have been forced to add new cloud roles and functions to their systems. The newest role in the industry is the cloud architect, with 28% demand topping the list.

Depending on the volume of data you plan to move to the cloud, your upfront cost may fluctuate, including the cost of training new employees for this shift to the cloud and hiring new experts for change processes.  

Challenge 4: Resistance to Adopt

Though they say that proper planning is the key to any change in an organization, not having your employees on board for these processes can make all your efforts go in vain. Most organizations take the direct stakeholders in a project onboard and notify the others once the project is completed. Doing this leads to increased confusion and then it’s too late to incorporate any changes into the system. Proper change management is key here. People are often resistant to change and cloud migration means CHANGE. Your current systems change, your processes change, and in many cases, even the leadership changes when moving to the cloud.

An easy way to avoid this is to make your communications clear and put them to air before the change is supposed to happen. This gives your concerned employees to be mentally ready before the real change happens and gives them time to analyze and mold their systems accordingly.  

Challenge 5: Skill shortage

As mentioned above, the shortage of the right skill available to help this shift is one of the major challenges to cloud migration. This transition to the cloud is a complex move that requires expertise. It’s possible that your existing man-force is not fully equipped to make this change and requires you to hire new employees for this migration process. Following the same trend, the demand for cloud experts has exceeded the supply to a great extent.

Challenge 6: Lack of a Good partner

Companies, mostly startups, make this mistake most often. Just having a cloud expert in your company is not sufficient to make this move and companies need to realize that. You cannot do this alone. No matter the size of your organization, you will need a partner to help you guide you through this process. Having an expert within your company is always an added advantage to help you understand this transition and complete it without any glitches. Taking reviews from existing companies that have had better experiences is a great way to start. You need a professional cloud service expert for this process to finish smoothly and not end up shifting your applications back to the system like others.  You need a partner who is not only an expert in cloud services but also in change management processes.

Concluding 

We have observed why moving to the cloud is an essential process for companies and how it can be challenging for the organization if not done correctly. Starting from performance and security to resistance from employees and skills required, every transitional move involves a cost in the initial stages that have to be taken care of by the organization on its own. This move is an inevitable yet strategic step towards a digital future for most organizations. Therefore, taking baby steps is the key to master it.

Start with migrating few applications at a time. Observe the changes. Learn from your mistakes and then take the second move. Divide your entire migration project into parts and milestones taking feedback after every single step. This will ensure your companies active participation in the process.

Lastly, as mentioned before, keep your communications clear and plan them way in advance. Tell your employees about the change and how it will impact their current systems. Allow them to give inputs and share their concerns on an open platform and give them time to adapt to the first milestone achieved before moving to the second one.

We understand these challenges and guidelines can be overwhelming at the beginning. Hence, consulting an expert cloud migration service provider is an easy way forward. We have already emphasized the importance of having the correct cloud partner above. Apptread is a cloud migration service provider you can approach for your future projects. Apptread will accelerate your migration to the cloud and provide a holistic approach to go digital while minimizing disruption to the business. They provide the best migration service for your enterprise, from cloud advisory to cloud build, from cloud migration to an enterprise cloud solution.

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