Facing troubles executing smooth cloud migration? Strategic planning is what you need. You are going to witness many obstacles in your cloud migration journey. This blog aims to help you overcome those obstacles the right way. Let's have a glance into the challenges that often come up while the cloud migration process and know about the effective strategy to solve them.

Lack of effective planning

Failing to plan is the same as planning to fail. A winning strategy is the one that involves minimum disorderliness.

How to solve this challenge?

Be clear about your goals. The very first thing is to sit and jot down your goals and purpose behind making the transition to the cloud. Make a list of applications you need to migrate. Avoid migrating applications that are against GDPR guidelines or the ones that contain extremely critical information. The next thing in the row is setting priorities. What will be the migration order? What applications should be migrated first? Then, come to performance analysis and baseline metrics. In addition to this, also take expenditure into the consideration. Try to optimize the cloud migration cost. The last step will be to optimize front-end applications for the enhanced end-user experience. While making a transition, encourage your in-house team to bring innovation-powered ideas to the table. Brainstorm ideas and apply the methods that specifically work for your organization.

Lack of Organized Migration Process

Another challenge is the selection of a suitable manner or order in which the migration is to be done. Migrating all the applications in a bulk can lead to chaos. Enterprises need to come up with a holistic-approach for the migration process to be flawless.

How to solve this challenge?

It is advisable to migrate applications and data in stages and not in a lump sum. In the first stage of migration, pick up non-core applications as these are easier to transfer. Likewise, you can have many stages in your journey. For large applications, transfer some elements to the cloud and run remaining on-premise. Be watchful to the deviations that arise during the process. Migration in stages lessens the risks and easy removal of errors that may occur. DevOps and containers can be deployed to make the process more efficient. The companies should recognize the weakness of their IT staff and collaborate with the external expert team to formulate apt models and achieve goals.

Accurate Estimation of Cost

Cost is indeed an important parameter while making a decision for cloud migration. Neither underestimating nor overestimating cost is a good thing, your estimation should be accurate. Cloud migration cost is influenced by a number of factors such as-

• Cloud platform
• Data storage
• Integrating cloud apps
• Processing power
• Testing tools
• Security services
• Proper training of teams

How to solve this challenge?

For more sound estimation of cloud migration cost, consider both direct and indirect factors. Direct cost factors are hardware/software, contracts, warranties, storage and network capacity, and facilities. While indirect factors involve downtime errors, reduced productivity, and less ROI. Now, make a financial estimate keeping all these factors in mind. Take notice of the cost of moving data to the cloud, integration of applications, and charges of cloud migration service providers.

In-depth Security Practices

You might be aware of the incidents like data breaches, malware intrusions, intrinsic threats, and many more. Further, in case of failure of cloud services, downtime can occur and performance can be reduced.

How to solve this challenge?

To tackle such challenges, integrate security tools that are specific to the cloud. Always go with PCI DSS and SOC 2 Type II certifications. Be strict about using two-factor authentication and take control of your endpoints. You can also establish protective layers with user-level security. Do vulnerability testing at regular intervals.

Final Thoughts

Cloud migration, when done successfully, unlocks countless opportunities for your organization. You will witness improved performance and revenue. However, the challenges that incur during the process might seem daunting. You can always collaborate with a cloud expert team to help you complete the journey successfully. CloudStakes is your perfect companion to accomplish this task. Our managed it services will deliver end-to-end cloud migration reliably, securely and seamlessly.