12 Cloud Migration Challenges and How to Overcome Them

Solution

A change management plan coupled with some key strategies can help you secure buy-in across the board and streamline the cloud adoption process.

If you want to drive successful adoption at the bottom, you have to start at the top. Your C-level leadership and other top leaders in the organizations play a significant role in driving cloud adoption and employee engagement. Thus, so you need strong executive buy-in right from the start.

Ensure the leadership understands the business requirements, as well as the objectives for going cloud. Get them to communicate the business case to the organization. When your employees understand why a change is being implemented, they are more likely to support it.

Furthermore, when choosing cloud solutions for your applications, prioritize integration and usability. Having a tool that is easy to use and understand will increase the likelihood that your employees will use it (and stick with it).

On top of that, applications that can work with your current tech stack are more attractive to users as they can easily seamlessly interpolate the new tools with their workflows. Integrations further streamline their work, improve efficiency. Remember to communicate those benefits before announcing changes.

Solution

The best way to avoid the unnecessary large cost of cloud migration is to prepare. Work with your cloud service provider to set out expenses related to the migration before you commit to a migration plan.

The planned cost of cloud migration should include the cloud platforms infrastructure costs, migration costs, financial risks from slow adoption, as well as the essential training required post-migration.

If not adequately planned, the budget necessary to cover all these alone is a challenge to moving to the cloud.

Our cloud migration consultant can help you with predicting the overall costs and to lower your cloud TCO.

Solution

You will need to both hire someone to help with the migration process and also upskill your existing team. You have to help them understand the impact of cloud designing and architecting like provisioning, cloud deployments, and auto-scaling.

You need engineers who know how your applications function; who will come up to speed on the cloud, and you also require cloud migration consultant from outside who possess the skills and know-how on migrating to the cloud. You need everyone to collaborate and figure out a cloud strategy and how you intend refactoring as you transition to cloud technology.

Get proactive with your education and awareness program. Set up cloud institutes, reward individuals for getting certifications, and make the whole process exciting. Create lectures around cloud migration challenges and let the team brainstorm on how to overcome them.

Let's be sincere; getting affordable individuals with the right skill sets is hard. Thus, take your time to hire DevOps engineers. At Softkraft, we have collaborated with several organizations with diverse cloud management and deployment projects.

Solution

Allocate time for discovery tooling. Tools like Cloudamize, RISC Networks, and other agent-based or agentless can connect your existing servers. These tools can also connect data for 15-30 days, size up the cloud servers, paint the architecture diagrams, and inform you about IOPS requirements. They can also reveal the executables that are active.

Without these tools, you might need a much longer and more expensive manual process of analyzing business-critical applications structure and dependencies. Discovery tools will save you time and help you achieve 90% of what you really need.

However, you also have to accept you will not have all your features documented. That's the more reason you are migrating to the cloud - so you can review your application ecosystem and make them function better. The best way to learn is on the job. Thus, you will learn more as you proceed on your migration journey.

Solution

Begin with a detailed cloud migration strategy. You can analyze your business objectives and current assets thoroughly to enable you to pick the appropriate strategy and the points you need to integrate.

A well-thought strategy will enable you to go through the transition and avoid any avoiding analysis paralysis during later stages. Factor in all applications that need to move, data and processing cost, and cost related to downtime.

At the same time, be prepared to tweak or reconstruct the critical cloud systems once the migration has been implemented successfully. You should highlight these vital systems in your roadmap and migration strategy. You can then go ahead and partition your entire strategy into different steps to streamline the transition.

Solution

Carefully research potential cloud vendors. Check their website, inspect testimonials, read use cases, and the terms of service closely. Most cloud vendors operate utilizing similar core strategies, but they all offer unique services.

Here are some ways to minimize vendor lock-ins:

• Ensure your data is portable, avoid proprietary formats, and closely state the data model by leveraging relevant plan standards to ensure files are legible for people and computers.
• Incorporate an exit strategy in the contract between you and your vendor, coupled with likely costs related to the implementation plan.
• Make your software more portable. This will ease switching between providers and also reduce risks associated with proprietary formatting lock-ins.

You should not discard a backup plan even with a 'perfect' cloud vendor. Save the names and details of other service providers in case you need to make a swift switch.

Also, take note of automatic contract renewals. While they can assist you in paying your bills, they can glue you to a vendor without you knowing it.

Solution

We usually guide our clients through an activity that defines their minimum viable cloud; their security framework, automation framework, operations framework, networking architecture, and core account structure.

And at the security framework level, you need to implement identity and access management. Define the access patterns. For instance, will there be global clients, and where would they be connecting - through the internet or VPN? It is imperative to understand these access patterns, as well as their related threat vectors.

Then, another thing to address is the network layout. This is important if you are moving from on-premises and already have an existing network environment. There will probably be the need to sync that on-prem with the current cloud environment.

Depending on the level of PII involved, you may need to ramp up your security measures. What will we do to prevent data loss, patch vulnerabilities, and your plan for end clients? The whole thing is a test of the minimum viable cloud from the cybersecurity perspective.

Check out our DevSecOps consulting services. We cover every component - from security engineering and security operations to compliance operations and security automation. Fill the gaps between IT and security while ensuring safe and quick delivery of code releases.

Solution

Cloud platforms are built with security in mind, and cloud vendors have industry-grade security systems to establish a holistic cloud environment. A secure cloud migration ensures that the company's data is passed through a preferred routable path and data is secure in the firewall at all times. This process ensures private data is masked from third parties during migration. It also guarantees compliance and the elimination of risks like data theft.

For an extra layer of assurance, ask your cloud vendor these questions prior to your collaboration.

• Where will the data be stored?
• Is there end-to-end encryption for data?
• What is the process of data migration from the cloud?
• What are the security policies and processes in place?
• Which security regulations are they compliant to (ISO 27001, HIPAA, PCI-DSS, etc.)?

The answers provided will guide you on the personae of the cloud vendor and intimate you with their procedures before collaborating with them.

Solution

The big advantage of the cloud infrastructure is that everything has an API, and becomes configurable. You can shut down cloud services if you’re not using them, and autoscaling to align with the actual workload is part of the cloud infrastructure.

You’re managing effectiveness — that’s core to actually taking advantage of the innovation platform of the cloud. The cost is minimized, and you are optimizing your performance. This is one of the best ways to maximize the cloud's innovative platform.

Your people are key to a successful DevOps transformation. Our DevOps consultants will help build a secure and efficient cloud operating culture, select efficient tooling and provide coaching to foster DevOps midset in your engineering teams.

Solution

Creating your SRE team goes beyond hiring DevOps engineers from the market. Your SRE teams should consist of people with established domain knowledge, as well as new viewpoints.

For starters, you can combine existing workers and new hires. A small team (2-4) will reduce your overhead and ensure your team is agile. Having identified the right individuals, the next step is figuring out how to position them for success. It's simple! Learning and development.

It takes more than a title change to become an SRE. It’s a culture change and a change in mindset. You will need to provide the necessary fundamentals for your team to position them for success.

You'll also need to ensure they are accountable to an authority figure who can eliminate bureaucracy and provide the team with what they need to establish new procedures and automate. The team needs to be also respected, so they do not end up a tools team or an ops team. The management chain must know the value and purpose of the SRE team.

Solution

It is about figuring out what the main issue is and determining if 12-factors can resolve them. Not all believers of the 12-factor apply all the 12.

The appropriate use case of this DevOps methodology is when designing new apps or refactoring processes for a project you are reworking in its entirety.