The cloud provides essential technological advantages that more and more businesses wish to incorporate into their business plans. However, if the cloud migration is not well planned and begins on the correct basis, it can be excessively demanding, expensive, and challenging.
This article discusses the six most costly mistakes to avoid when using a cloud solution in your business.
Companies have become more aware of the cloud’s benefits, prospects, and applications as catalysts for innovation and digital transformation.
Companies that use cloud-based solutions save money, improve security, boost flexibility, and create an entirely new, digital business.
Despite the cloud’s great potential, many firms confront difficulties in establishing their operations in the cloud cost-effectively and appropriately. According to a poll of 750 senior executives done by Accenture, only 37% of respondents have achieved the desired results with their cloud activities. Only three out of ten executives are entirely confident that the company’s cloud initiatives will produce the required commercial value over time.
The pitfalls are numerous and possibly costly, but if the cloud migration is carefully planned and executed, the cloud solution can result in a nearly 50% return on investment within two to three years.
This post examines six of the most costly and frequent cloud blunders that businesses make. If you avoid these mistakes, your company will have a future-oriented platform while also spending less than if it performs the task incorrectly.
1) There’s no apparent motivation for the cloud migration.
What is the best answer if someone asks you, “Why are you going to the cloud?”
Assume you reply, “The company has concluded that we should transition to the cloud.” If you are uninformed of the cloud’s advantages, opportunities, and benefits, you will most likely be unable to make advantage of them.
Unfortunaltey, this is not an uncommon situation. A common issue with implementing cloud solutions in businesses is a lack of understanding of what the cloud is and the business opportunities. According to a 2020 survey, up to 84 percent of IT managers want business management to understand the cloud better.
This paper is intended to show how cloud computing might benefit a company and why they should consider it. This paper will also go through the reasons why you should utilize the cloud, which is a necessary first step in any business’s cloud migration and must be set and reconciled before anything else may happen. In a stated cloud strategy, we frequently see firms that have not established which drivers constitute the foundation for the cloud journey.
Before beginning the cloud migration process, make sure you’ve completed the following tasks:
- Knowing your motivations: There are numerous reasons to determine the causes of cloud adoption in enterprises. Choosing yours is essential for building a practical plan for overcoming cloud transfer issues and accomplishing your objectives. Microsoft Azure has established several critical motivations for moving to the cloud. These drivers can serve as a starting point, but other factors may be more significant to your business and will drive your cloud-backed business transformation in the future. Understanding these motives will make it easier to facilitate the process, have appropriate planning sessions, and connect your cloud journey to your business strategy.
- Determine the intended business outcomes: A effective cloud strategy necessitates the identification of specific business benefits and their connection to your motives. Set clear goals for company outcomes that are aligned with your motivations. Microsoft Azure has created a template that clients can agree on which findings to prioritize with stakeholders and decision-makers.
- Define your business logic: The implementation of cloud solutions is frequently connected with substantial expenses, emphasizing the significance of a well-thought-out and planned migration strategy. As a result, it is worthwhile to create a business case that includes a financial plan, technical assessments, and stated business outcomes. A business plan that makes it easier to garner cooperation from the finance department and other departments accelerates the cloud journey and allows for a more flexible business. Simultaneously, you should develop an economic model to forecast the business impact of the cloud deployment strategy.
2) You treat the cloud as though it were another IT project.
Cloud computing necessitates a paradigm shift. Traditional IT philosophies and deployment approaches will no longer be applicable in a modern cloud world because the cloud journey is a business transformation and a technological initiative.
Businesses who treat the cloud journey as another IT project and build their cloud environment around yesterday’s IT models rather than tomorrow’s business demands will be significantly less able to reap the benefits of the cloud, lowering their return on investment.
According to McKinsey, most CIOs and CTOs rely on previously successful, traditional implementation techniques, making it nearly impossible to reap the cloud’s many benefits.
Assume you don’t look at the company’s cloud activities as a whole. In that case, you risk being beaten by competitors who use more modern technology platforms to improve corporate agility and innovation than you can handle.
Understanding and embracing this paradigm change is required for a successful cloud migration. The company’s strategic, tactical, and operational needs must be determined and turned into IT requirements before embarking on the cloud journey. This implies that the business side must be a driving force behind cloud migration.
3) You commit to a single cloud provider.
Many firms are taking advantage of the benefits of utilizing a variety of cloud providers, therefore many utilize services from several cloud providers. Such “multi-cloud” techniques ensure that you do not grow dependent on a single provider, that you limit risk, and that you use resources from multiple providers to get the most out of each service.
The inverse can swiftly lead to “vendor lock-in.” Vendor lock-in can occur when you commit to only one cloud provider and indicate that you intend to relocate your business away from its existing provider. However, due to high prices, complexity, a lack of knowledge, and time-consuming processes, it cannot implement the adjustment.
According to a Fujitsu poll, nearly 80% of respondents are concerned about the hazards of vendor lock-in. According to the same study, “source flexibility,” which counteracts vendor lock-in by diversifying supply chains, is regarded as business-critical or of high importance by over 80% of respondents.
Vendor lock-in stifles progress and frequently results in a demanding operational environment, financial constraints, and, as a result, a costly error to remedy later. When planning a cloud journey, you must prepare the cloud infrastructure for multi-cloud use from the start.
4) You do not have a scaling design.
If you need to scale up traditional on-premise systems, you must often invest in and deploy new servers, which is costly and time-consuming.
A cloud solution is essentially a service that can be scaled out, in, up, or down as needed. Assume your firm is subject to seasonal fluctuations. In that manner, you can quickly add more resources or user licenses when the demand is high and scale down when the usage is low.
One of the significant benefits of cloud systems is that this scalability may be automated utilizing built-in capability. These solutions ensure that you only use the capacity you require by scaling out when the load grows and scaling in when the extra power is no longer necessary.
Cloud solutions can give significant efficiency savings, but only if your cloud system is designed for independent scaling from the outset.
Assume you did not create the environment to allow for automated scaling. In that instance, there is a substantial chance that you will have to commit human resources to scale up and down as needed, preventing you from reaping the benefits of cloud efficiency.
5) You select the incorrect cloud migration plan.
When businesses first incorporate the cloud into their infrastructure, they are often eager to do the cloud migration as soon as feasible. However, if you select the incorrect cloud migration technique, you risk introducing costly errors and unnecessary security threats to your cloud solution.
A cloud migration strategy is a comprehensive plan that your company utilizes to migrate existing apps and data to the cloud. Such methodologies are critical for determining and implementing the quickest, least dangerous, and most cost-effective path from existing systems to the cloud. Not to mention, such tactics aid in deciding whether the admin can eliminate programs, replace, or update them.
There are numerous cloud migration strategies, each set of goals and objectives. These tactics can be loosely categorized into four categories:
- Rehosting: This cloud migration method swiftly transfers existing apps to the cloud and does not require any code changes. When time is of the essence, the approach is ideal since it results in lower investment costs, freed up data center space, and quick returns.
- Refactoring: This method entails making minor adjustments to your apps to make use of the cloud. This method is especially appropriate for rebuilding your apps to perform best in the cloud, and it frequently results in faster updates, code portability, and improved cloud efficiency.
- Rearchitect: This cloud migration method entails considerable changes or application deconstruction. The programs have been redesigned and constructed using a new architecture compatible with cloud technologies. This technique enables larger scale and flexibility, the more accessible introduction of new cloud functions, a mix of multiple technologies, and optimizes the operating situation. Container-based applications are also easier to migrate to other driving environments if necessary.
- Rebuild: This solution goes a step farther than migration by rebuilding the program from the ground up with new code created utilizing a cloud-based approach. This technique is ideal for accelerating innovation, producing apps more quickly, and lowering running expenses.
The business drivers and incentives for installing a cloud solution in your organization determine which technique you employ. If you do not thoroughly grasp these motivations and causes, you risk selecting an incorrect or ineffective migration approach.
6) You do not prepare the organization for a new cloud environment.
Every day Cloud solutions enable more automation and self-service, which affects the relationship between the IT and business sides and necessitates the organization’s daily adaptation to a new cloud. If you are shifting your business to the cloud, you must create an organization that can reap the benefits of the cloud.
Building an organization frequently necessitates a reevaluation of the function of IT inside the firm. Instead of monitoring server capacity, the IT department becomes more of a premise advisor and advisor for the business side of the firm. In the future, data centers will not need to be manually set up servers, firewalls, and other networking components.
Nonetheless, it will instead focus on making available, maintaining, and monitoring the cloud solution’s board and rules when new services are introduced.
A fully cloud-based business ensures that the organization is suited to the new way of life by pushing a cultural shift toward increasing cooperation, preferably in autonomous teams.
Here are a few strategies and practices to get you started:
- Agile: Agile is a practice that reduces process barriers and enables developers to work more closely together to produce software faster, engage more closely with clients, and respond to changes more quickly. Thus, agility focuses on procedures, emphasizes difference, and speeds up delivery processes. Read more on Agile here.
- DevOps is the practice of creating a collaborative culture between development and IT operations to streamline software development and rollout. The methodology seeks to improve efficiency by boosting the company’s ability to produce software applications and services more quickly. More information on DevOps can be found here.
- Continuous Integration (CI) and Continuous Delivery (CD) are software development practices that allow members of a development team to deliver code changes more often and reliably. Because the rollout process is more automated with CI / CD, development teams may focus more on business needs, code quality, and security. More information on CI / CD can be found here.
Cloud migration is difficult, but it is well worth the effort.
The possibilities in the cloud are nearly limitless, and the benefits of the cloud have the potential to be huge. Fortunately, you are not alone on your cloud journey. In many circumstances, having a travel companion on the team is required. Ceeview.com has vast experience assisting both public and private enterprises on their journey to a new cloud in everyday life.
Frequently Asked Questions
What are the six most costly mistakes related to Cloud Migration?
1. Lack of motivation for cloud migration, 2: Seeing cloud computing as another IT project, 3: Committing to a single provider, 4: No scaling design, 5: Selecting the inappropriate migration plan, and finally, 6: The company is unprepared for a new cloud environment.
What are the cloud migration strategies?
There are essentially three types of cloud migration strategies: 1: Rehosting: This technique quickly migrates current applications to the cloud without requiring any code changes. 2: Rearchitect: This cloud migration strategy requires significant changes or deconstruction of the application. And 3: Rebuild: This method takes migration a step further by recreating the application from the bottom up using cloud-based code.
What are the stages of cloud migration?
Cloud migration is a process that includes the following stages: Stage nr one is to define the business case. Stage nr. 2: Cloud readiness assessment. Developing a cloud strategy is the third stage. Stage number. 4: Cloud migration planning. Stage number. 5 focuses on executing the cloud migration, whereas stage nr. 6 is about managing life in the cloud.
What are the 3 most common practices during Cloud Migration?
1: Agile is a technique that removes process barriers and enables developers to collaborate more closely to build software faster, engage with clients more intimately, and respond more swiftly to change. 2: DevOps is the technique of fostering collaboration between development and IT operations to accelerate the creation and deployment of software. And 3: Continuous Integration (CI) and Continuous Delivery (CD) are software development strategies that enable development team members to more frequently and reliably release code changes.
Why is cloud migration needed?
Cloud migration is needed because it can provide essential technological advantages for businesses like disaster recovery, scalability, and increased efficiency.