Implementing new and emerging technologies can be costly but the advantages they can give to your business are oftentimes too good to be ignored. Even worse, if you do not take on technologies that can tremendously improve your business efficiency and operations, you may end up being left behind by the more forward-looking competition.
This is the dilemma facing modern businesses, with cloud being a good example. A survey by Forrester found that while 86% of business and IT leaders are willing to continue their investment in the cloud to contribute to their digital growth, they are faced with several challenges:
40% experienced higher costs than estimated, particularly around application transformation.
37% took a longer time than expected to migrate applications or workload to the cloud.
27% found that integrating, maintaining, and managing the cloud environment was more complex than anticipated.
This shows that if not done correctly, migrating to cloud will end up becoming very costly, causing businesses to waste their digital resources and adversely affect their applications, both immediately and in the long run. To avoid such problems, here are some pitfalls you have to avoid when migrating your applications to the cloud:
Wrong applications being migrated: When migrating your workloads, you have to first identify which of your applications work best in the cloud. Do you really have to migrate a particular application, or will the drawbacks outweigh the benefits? Determine what is best suited to working in the cloud, what should be retained on-prem and what can be decommissioned altogether. There are many approaches in migrating to the cloud and it is important to know which one works best for you. Prior assessment and planning are needed so you will not migrate the wrong applications and avoid all the complications that may come as a result.
Confusion between on-prem and cloud: When it comes to on-premises or cloud, it is not an either-or situation. The future may look “cloudy”, but you do not have to go all in on the cloud, especially not when you are just starting your cloud journey. In many cases, a hybrid cloud approach can give you the best of both worlds. You have to understand that the cloud is not the silver bullet for all your problems in application deployment, hence relying solely on the cloud is not advisable. There are many advantages to the cloud and at the same time, on-prem has separate benefits that are not present in the former.
Unprepared for migration downtime: When moving your workloads and applications to the cloud, always take into account the downtimes that your organisation may potentially face. Being unprepared in this instance may cause an organisation to experience downtimes that can cause considerable losses. You should not underestimate the process, especially the part where you need to integrate your on-prem applications to the cloud. When migrating, it is best to move applications and their corresponding data at the same time and take other precautions to minimise downtime.
Gaps in security and compliance: When migrating to the cloud, organisations often find themselves faced with unforeseen security and compliance issues. For example, they discover that they have sensitive data that must be retained on-prem, which require additional enterprise data management and governance tools to ensure regulatory compliance standards are met. In addition, securing data may require a different approach than in a strictly on-prem environment, and there are also risks you may encounter while migrating to the cloud. Moreover, cloud misconfigurations are one of the leading causes of data breaches. Security has to be top of mind for any organisation that is migrating to cloud. Be sure to cover all of your security bases.
The good news is that major cloud providers do provide the support and tools to help ensure successful cloud migration. For example, Microsoft Azure can help you avoid the aforementioned pitfalls by defining your approach based on three considerations: migration triggers, business goals and workload priorities. Azure can also guide organisations in migrating and modernising time-sensitive and business-critical applications, which need to be deployed and run immediately.
These days, when it comes to implementing new technologies or adopting a more cloud-centric approach, organisations no longer need to figure out everything on their own or make large investments to operate and manage their cloud environments.
By outsourcing management to a seasoned partner such as Rackspace Technology, you can reduce your risk and shorten your time to value from your Azure migrations. Rackspace Technology’s specialist migration team has the strategy, planning and execution expertise you need, across all application migration scenarios — so you can modernise faster and more successfully while protecting your business.
Experts from Rackspace Technology have extensive experience migrating across on-premises and all leading public and private clouds including Azure. To find out more about how Rackspace Technology can help you get started with Microsoft Azure with the do’s and don’ts in cloud migration. Click Here.
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