Cloud Migration: Common Mistakes to avoid when Migrating to the Cloud

| James Edmondson Last updated 13 Sep, 2022

Cloud Migration Mistakes — Image Credit: D3Damon / Getty Images Signature

As more and more businesses utilize cloud resources, business owners must understand the cloud migration process. To make an organization’s migration to the cloud as smooth as possible, businesses need to be aware of the most prevalent cloud migration mistakes.

Cloud migration offers businesses many benefits, such as reduced costs, improved application performance, flexible storage, faster deployment time, and enhanced security features.

The first step toward leveraging these benefits is understanding common cloud migration mistakes. In this way, businesses can mitigate any challenges and plan appropriately to avoid them in the future.

Below, we outline the top ten most common cloud migration mistakes and how to prevent them so you can benefit from cloud computing without significant setbacks.

Common Cloud Migration Mistakes

Lack of Purpose

A cloud migration strategy is not a one-size-fits-all approach. Organizations need to develop a tailored cloud migration plan to transfer their infrastructure, applications, and data from on-premises to the cloud.

This can be overwhelming and often result in unclear purpose and objectives.

It is critical to conduct thorough research to determine the most efficient strategy to prioritize and transfer your infrastructure.

The precise timeline for cloud migration is determined by the size and complexity of your infrastructure. Before you begin, you must understand why you are migrating to the cloud.

Every company wants better performance. However, many companies lack baseline performance metrics or methods to measure what better performances mean.

Does performance relate to the end-user experience? Are you able to scale up or down workloads to reduce consumption? Can you measure performance by the time it takes to upgrade or deploy?

Once you have established how to measure performance, you can tie it back to your customers, applications, and business.

This will allow you to determine if apps perform poorly during or after the migration. This helps to manage expectations during significant changes and quantifies success. It is necessary to compare the pre-and post-migration platforms against similar workloads.

The exact measurements you use will depend on your business needs, but these are some general measures:

Component running times
Response times for applications
Overall execution time for application
To validate component connectivity and service accessibility, test applications
API metrics (page load, memory utilization, CPU, server performance)
Log output load
Over time, the incidence reporting load
Automatization (and consider automation a first-class citizen since it will improve overall performance)
Changes in operational costs due to task automation and migration
Use application types that simulate your environment to test.

Resist Scope Creep

A common cloud migration mistake is scope creep. Although all companies would love to solve their problems in one go, it is crucial that you remain laser-focused on one issue. It may seem tempting to increase disaster recovery and backups. However, expanding the scope can create additional problems.

Scope creep can also lead to problems when something fails.It is impossible to determine whether the failure was caused by your overall project goal or the scope.

You can’t migrate what you cannot find

While many organizations know what they currently support, they don’t need to know what they want when they migrate.

Knowing the number of applications you support is easy since your vendor will most likely bill you.It is essential to see the number of applications used, their support teams, interdependencies, and what services they use. These variables will help you decide how to migrate and support your environment.

When mapping out the owners, it is vital to identify which automated test scripts are available. This will allow you to confirm that each application is working correctly.Even though every application should have automated testing scripts, it is essential to identify the owners of each application.

Also, you will need to search for unmaintained and unused applications.It is crucial to search for unmaintained or unused applications before migrating.Surprisingly, you’ll often find that there is no master mapping of all app owners. This can lead to problems during and after the migration.

Many companies don’t have a central place that lists who has which applications, their business impact, and what they do. It is, therefore, essential to focus on inventory.

It is crucial to quickly query and locate relevant information to increase efficiency and make better business decisions.

How do you start? Answer the following questions.

Which regions do you operate in?
Which applications are available in each region?
Which services does each application use in each region?
Which version of Linux do you use?
What applications can communicate with other applications in the region?
Which applications are client-facing, and which ones are internal?

These starting data points won’t answer all your questions but will give you the insight you need.

Accepting the Unknowns

No matter how meticulously you document and audit every detail, unknown variables that could impact downtime, customers, coworkers, expenses, and timelines will always remain. The technical team must discover these unknowns. Here are some ways you can help:

For unknowns, add a timeline
You have more resources to assist you if an item is not known.
Flexibility is vital in company policies, internal meetings, and the rollout of new features.
Backup plans such as rollbacks are essential in case of failure.
To gain momentum, focus on small wins before you start planning for the bigger ones. As long as there is no additional overhead, tangible successes can boost morale.

A thorough audit of your organization is a good idea. An audit will serve as a guide throughout the project.This will be your guide, preventing you from deprioritizing or putting things on hold once the project is underway.

You may need to escalate to senior management to prioritize the actions that you wish to take.It is more beneficial to get to know each team and to communicate with them than to try to control their heads.

Neglecting Information Security

Data security must be maintained in the cloud. Cloud migration shouldn’t begin until you examine your cloud provider’s cyber security risks, threats, and capabilities (or providers).

The migration process is risky due to the sheer volume of data in transit, often transmitted without adequate security precautions and controls, a common nightmare for mergers and acquisitions.

Both on-premise and cloud systems are vulnerable, and some are cloud-native. Common cloud security challenges include misconfigurations, insider attacks, lack of IAM, exposed dev and staging environments, poor regulatory compliance, insecure APIs, and lack of visibility. These concerns may require non-traditional cloud security methods.

The shared responsibility notion of cloud architecture means the cloud provider is responsible for securing the cloud. However, you are responsible for safeguarding what’s in the cloud.

Businesses should aim to encrypt all data (in transit and at rest). This can be achieved using multi-factor authentication, implementing needed security controls and configurations, isolating specific workloads, and educating employees on cloud security.

Migrating in a single phase

Cloud migration should not be hurried. We previously stated that evaluating a migration’s necessary expenditures and time is critical before beginning the process.

Understanding that moving to the cloud does not happen immediately after you’ve laid out your strategy is critical. So, while it may be appealing to relocate your entire infrastructure at once, the process is and should be extensive to assure a successful migration.

Migration to the cloud might take months, if not years. It depends on how much data, apps, and infrastructure must be moved. Following that, cloud migration should be done in stages.

Migrate data in the most logical order—starting with non-essential data and progressing to more sensitive data later. Furthermore, not all data must be transferred; some sensitive and highly confidential data is better-maintained on-premises.

To ensure an efficient and low-risk migration, businesses should analyze the infrastructure that must be transferred to the cloud. They can then develop a migration plan for what will be migrated and when and in what order and secure team support at every stage.

Insufficient Testing

Once you have defined the parameters and expected outcomes for your project, it is crucial to ensure that all environments that need to be replicated are done.

This includes the “playground,” which is your operational environment. Here you will test everything and then move on to production.

It is crucial to ensure that the playground environment you create is the same as yours.Pivotal is the best choice in this instance.You will feel more confident and have fewer issues.

Lack of Management Support

It is important to have good management support.Migrations are a long process – It’s not just about moving platforms. The impact on services also needs to be understood and minimized.

Management should know what you plan to do and your business’s risks.Management might be concerned about the possible impact of migrations on their bottom lines.Share all mitigation options.

Poor Budgeting

Cost and ROI are often cited as significant benefits of cloud migration, but that’s a myth. There are reasonable, low-cost alternatives, but they’re not comprehensive enough for most organizations.

The cloud migration procedure can be costly and time-consuming. Thus, unforeseen delays and excessive spending are possible.

Organizations migrating to the cloud must estimate the time and budget needed to avoid surpassing them. More costs can be built when transferring an infrastructure that isn’t prepared to resist cloud migration’s disruption of IT operations.

You should never start cloud migration without at least a basic cost estimate and timeline estimate. This will help you get the most out of your not-so-small cloud investment.

Cloud Migration Mistakes: Taking it one step at a time

Many businesses have already transitioned to the cloud, and it is not uncommon for migrations to take place within the cloud between different cloud providers (cloud-to-cloud migration).

For many businesses, migrating to a cloud environment can be challenging, and the above factors should be considered for business taking their initial steps to the cloud.

However, the cloud also offers opportunities to improve existing business processes. Businesses should start by taking stock of their infrastructure components, business processes, and in-house expertise and formulate a strategy that encompasses all organizational requirements.