Cloud Migration: The Unanticipated Delays Faced by Enterprises

Organizations consider migration to the cloud for obvious reasons- its low investment risks and operational benefits of scalability, agility, access, and reliability. However, the enterprises make the mistake of thinking that they can manage the migration process on their own.

Migrating applications to the cloud can be trickier than you anticipate. This only results in frequent interruptions in service, intolerable delays, downtime, and overshooting the allocated budget. These types of projects require expertise and proper preparation. Sadly, very few are successful in completing the projects as originally planned.

Velostrata announced recent research studies, conducted by Dimensional Research. Around 208 IT professionals representing industries of different sizes had participated in the survey. About 75% of them admitted that the Cloud migration was not only delayed by over a year and it was becoming difficult to control the budget as well.

An Enterprise Could Come Across When Implementing A Migration Plan Many Problems. These Include:

1. Taking Longer Than Anticipated:

This is by far the most common problem businesses face. It has its impact on meeting the scheduled deadline. Reasons could be anything- a senior staff handling the project quitting, facing issues in coding and restructuring of some application, inadequate testing, or some internal application issues needing emergency attention from the in-house experts, which have put the migration process on temporary standstill.

2. Finding It More Complex Than Expected:

About 60 % of the surveyed professionals reported that they did not anticipate the cloud migration to be so complicated. This again is primarily due to lack of expertise and skills. Some failed outright which caused revenue losses and waste of time as well as resources.

3. Incompetency in Adjustment:

The leading cloud providers like Amazon AWS, Microsoft Azure, Google Cloud require a different type of proficiency. These cloud giants keep adding new technologies or upgrade frequently making it near to impossible for the in-house experts to cope up with the pressure.

4. It Doesn’t Work as Expected:

This happens always more so with the mid-market businesses. The decision takers made wrong calculations. Either they did not completely understand the new system, expecting things to move faster than possible, or they hoped it would work one way only to find later that they made a wrong estimation.

Read More: Portfolio and Discovery as Drivers of Successful Cloud Migration

5.  Inaccurate Estimation of Costs:

Overshooting the estimations and budget assessment is another major challenge that was reported by the professionals that had contributed to the survey. The mistake made is incorrectly estimating the cost of service. The calculations go wrong when it comes to expanding over a period of a month or year.

6. People and Process:

The biggest challenge sometimes is their employees. The small new companies are all geared up for innovation. The problems come with the old companies that are habituated to the traditional legacy systems and applications. A disinterested project manager can pull down the enthusiasm of the entire team.  Disinterest in the project leads to losing control over everything- the schedule, budget etc. It requires dedication and skills to coordinate and work in harmony.

7. Security Strategies

Yet another big challenge is transforming the security posture to the cloud environment.  It will be wrong thinking to assume the cloud provider will manage all the security features. The cybercriminals hover around the internet to look for the smallest loophole and can wreck your complete business. The not so recent D-DoS attacks and the Ransomware attacks are a few experiences organizations will not forget easily.

There could be many more such unforeseen challenges that could be specific to a business or an industry. A welcome news from the Dimensional Research and Velostrata survey is that majority of the participants have appreciated the services of the cloud partners.

While it is clear the big three -Amazon AWS, Microsoft Azure, dominate the cloud and Google Cloud, choosing the right service partner will play a major role in the migration process to the cloud.

The cloud hosting service providers or managed cloud partners as they are called can assist an organization in choosing the right cloud platform for each of their applications. Multicloud strategy as it is termed can help an organization utilize and build a cloud stack. This will enable them to explore and utilize the service that will work best for their needs. Adopting a multi cloud technique will save time and resources in modifying existing applications by using compatible technologies. The partner role in implementing the security in the cloud environment can be more reliable and effective than what an organization could do to manage on their own.

Cloud migration is not a simple task. It needs strategic thinking everywhere right from the time of planning, preparing the staff, which applications are cloud-ready, what needs modifications, what technologies to adopt, and the right costings. The first step is to choose a cloud migration partner service to support their move to the cloud.