The first big challenge in cloud is getting systems and data to the cloud. These are 7 errors that can make your cloud migration a disaster.

1. Lacking a cloud strategy.

Succeeding with cloud requires a comprehensive strategy that goes beyond technology considerations to address budget, training, and organizational concerns. The cloud strategy also needs to scope out the migration plan, making it small enough to achieve in a reasonable amount of time, but complex enough to prove cloud’s feasibility and value.

2. Choosing the wrong type of cloud or wrong cloud provider.

Getting cloud right requires knowing what type of cloud you need—IaaS, PaaS, or SaaS. Each of those requires different levels of support from your organization. Once you know the type of cloud you need, you need to choose the right provider, based on factors such as technology available, management tools, security and compliance certifications, and costs and billing methods. It may be the case that the best solution is a private cloud or true hybrid cloud, requiring your data center to become its own cloud provider.

3. Targeting the wrong applications for cloud.

Not all applications are appropriate for the cloud. Legacy applications may have design and support problems that make them a bad fit, or depend on old versions of products that aren’t supported in the cloud. The same may be true for custom-developed, specialized applications. Consider focusing cloud migration on important but standardized functions such as email and ERP software.

4. Using “lift and shift” to get to cloud fast.

Lift and shift migration strategies can usually get you to cloud faster than rearchitecting applications, but they may not be the best strategy. Remember, in cloud you pay for what you use, but existing applications weren’t built to limit resource usage and scale only when they need more capacity. This means you can end up spending much more than you expected for cpu, memory, and storage utilization.

5. Keeping the same data model.

Just as keeping your existing application architecture can cost you more in the cloud, so can keeping your existing data architecture. If you’re storing multiple copies of data sets, if you have non-normalized data, or if you have inconsistent data models across applications, you can be storing a lot of unnecessary data, and that storage will cost real money once the data is in the cloud.

6. Ignoring operational issues.

While the cloud provider will handle a lot of your cloud support, you still need your operations team to monitor and manage your cloud. Your procedures will need to be revisited and updated for the cloud; you may need new approaches to infrastructure, application, and security monitoring. Additionally, your staff will need to be trained on the cloud technology.

7. Going it alone.

Migrating to cloud is a significant undertaking, and even a small trial project requires skills and experience that your team just doesn’t have yet. Work with an experienced partner like Prescient Solutions. Our team designs, implements, and supports cloud solutions for clients in the Chicago and Schaumburg areas. Contact us to avoid making mistakes during your cloud migration.