The potential benefits of cloud migration—economy, scalability, reliability, availability, and doing things faster and better—are what attracts many businesses to the cloud. However, whether you are moving an individual workload or an entire IT infrastructure, migrating to the cloud successfully requires overcoming many challenges, even before you start moving resources from an on-prem data center.
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If these challenges are not addressed in advance, the potential benefits of cloud migration may not materialize at all. It has been estimated that without adequate cloud migration planning, 80 percent of businesses will fail to achieve their anticipated cost savings; while Gartner suggests inadequate planning can result in some businesses` IT spend increasing by 20 percent more than the status quo.
What are the challenges of migrating to the cloud successfully?
The challenges of migrating to the cloud successfully vary according to the nature of each business and its existing IT infrastructure. Typically the challenges fall into three areas—running applications on-premises vs in the cloud, security, and cost—although for some businesses it is not the technology that is challenging, but a lack of people with the right skill sets to execute a cloud migration plan successfully.
Existing Architecture vs. Cloud Architecture
IT architectures have been described as Lego sets. Although the building blocks are essentially the same, there are many variations on how the building blocks can be put together. So, before moving any elements of your IT infrastructure to the cloud, you have to establish which have a compatible architecture and which may need modification to make them suitable for migrating to the cloud. It’s a best practice to take this a step further and ensure apps are not only compatible, but also optimized for their new environment.
On-Prem Security vs. Cloud Security
Regardless of where data is stored and processed, breaches can occur due to human errors, application vulnerabilities, and poor security practices. When data is stored and processed in the cloud, additional risks exist due to issues such as insufficient credential and access management. Before migrating to the cloud, adequate mechanisms need to be put in place in order to protect data both at rest and in transit.
Calculating the Total Cost of Ownership
There are several online tools that can help you compare the cost of running resources in the cloud when compared to running them in an on-prem data center, but these do not necessarily tell the whole story. To calculate the Total Cost of Ownership, you also have to factor in such things as the cost of modifying resources to make them suitable for cloud migration and the cost of enhancing data security.
Addressing Skills Shortages
A further cost you may have to take into account is finding people with the right skill sets to execute a cloud migration plan successfully—or retraining the talent you already have in place. This challenge to cloud migration may not only cost you money, but also time. It is a problem many businesses already migrated to the cloud are experiencing because the demand for cloud skills is greater than the supply.
How to Overcome the Challenges and Plan a Successful Cloud Migration
It was mentioned above that the challenges of migrating to the cloud successfully vary according to the nature of each business and its existing IT infrastructure. Fortunately, the way to overcome the challenges and plan a successful cloud migration is not so complicated and consists of using several features of CloudHealth.
The first of these is the CloudHealth Migration Assessment. This solution connects agentlessly to your VMware environment to collect and analyzes usage and performance data before reporting on what existing assets are suitable for migration, what they will cost to run in the public cloud of your choice, and what your new cloud architecture should look like. Then, to address potential security issues, you should use the CloudHealth Security Best Practice Policies. This report highlights areas of technical risk exposure such as open ports and unencrypted data, and areas of operational risk such as too many permissions or unenforced password policies. The resulting Security Violation Report makes recommendations about how to resolve these issues.
Plan for a Successful Cloud Migration with CloudHealth
If you are looking at moving some, or all, of your existing IT infrastructure to the cloud—you are invited to get in touch and discuss how CloudHealth can help you plan a cloud migration strategy successfully using the features of our cloud management platform.
CloudHealth is an accredited AWS Migration Competency Partner and also supports migration to Azure. Using the CloudHealth Platform, you can conduct migration assessments on your business’s assets and helps you plan a cloud migration strategy, from an individual workload to an entire IT infrastructure.
