Changing to cloud computing is a major disruption to the way your IT works. Minimize the disruption with careful planning that avoids these cloud migration mistakes.

1. Moving the wrong applications. Not every application is a good fit for the cloud. Some legacy applications or applications with hardcoded dependencies on specific instance names will be difficult to transition. Applications dependent on specific versions of operating systems and middleware may need upgrades before migrating. Moving applications that are already targeted for retirement is a waste of effort. Take time to evaluate your workloads and only migrate the ones that will make the transition easily.
2. Moving everything at once. If you aren’t familiar with the cloud, migrating all your workloads at once will be extremely difficult and risky. Go slow, instead. Prioritize your applications. Start with an application that’s small and non-critical but will still expose you to the risks and rewards of the cloud environment. Allow time after the first migration completes to absorb lessons learned from the experience, as well as develop skills monitoring and managing the cloud environment, before planning to migrate the remainder of your applications.
3. Moving to the wrong size instances. Many on-site environments are over-provisioned for current need, because it takes a long time to bring additional capacity into the data center. If you duplicate your current configuration in the cloud, you may end up spending more money than you need. Instead, part of your workload evaluation should assess their actual performance and capacity requirements so you can choose the most appropriate instance for them now. Because there is no purchasing and provisioning delay for getting a new instance in the cloud, it’s easy to add capacity later when there’s an actual need.
4. Failing to address security. Don’t rely on the cloud provider to keep your applications and data safe. Default configuration settings may expose private data to the public internet. Make a careful study of the controls the provider offers to ensure your settings are appropriate for your applications. When possible, integrate identity management in the cloud with the identity management used on-premises to make the account provisioning and monitoring process as easy as possible.
5. Not planning to monitor and manage your cloud. You also shouldn’t rely on the cloud provider to monitor and manage your cloud. Outages do happen, and you need monitoring to let you know when a problem is developing so you can respond to it. It’s also important to monitor cloud usage. Your costs will grow as usage grows, so keep an eye out for resources that should be shut down, like development and test environments after the project is done.
6. Not archiving data. Your cloud provider will handle backing up systems to be able to recover data in case a device fails, but they don’t typically preserve the historic data you need to archive for compliance purposes. Be sure you can both archive and destroy data in the cloud in accordance with all relevant regulations.

Prescient Solutions offers IT consulting and managed services to Chicago and Schaumburg-area businesses that help you avoid making these cloud migration mistakes. As a Microsoft Partner, we’re experts in Microsoft Azure cloud and have a team of certified experts to help solve your technology problems. Call us to learn how to make your cloud migration successful.