We’ve talked fairly often about planning your cloud migration. Yet despite all the planning businesses do, sometimes cloud migrations fail. These are some of the main reasons:

Wrong migration approach used.

Lift and shift is often the default method for migrating to cloud, and why not? It’s relatively straightforward and requires the least time and effort of any migration approach. However, it also requires the least understanding of the workloads being migrated. That means workloads can be migrated to architectures that aren’t a good fit, don’t result in cost savings, or don’t deliver desired benefits like the ability to easily scale in response to demand.

Lacking skills.

Cloud is still new technology for many businesses, and migrations, especially the first cloud migration, requires skills the in-house team may not have. While the business’s own IT staff needs to be part of any migration, in many organizations, their primary responsibility should be to provide knowledge about the workloads and to learn about the cloud, while an outside team experienced in cloud migrations guides the planning and executes many of the more complex procedures.

Compliance and security are add-ons.

In many software development projects, security is left to be added on at the end. The same is true for cloud migrations, and, as in development, has the same issues. It’s simply more difficult to add on security than it is to build it into the work in the first place. Businesses that plan to address cloud security by simply setting some configuration options after deployment are likely to overlook vulnerabilities that require a more strategic harm reduction approach.

Workloads are viewed in isolation.

If no man is an island, neither is any workload. Yet plans for migrating workloads often neglect to consider their full dependencies. Unless you plan to move all your workloads to the cloud at once, the major technical challenges of cloud are often the integration challenges—arranging secure communications between resources distributed in the cloud, as well as hybrid configurations that require communications between the cloud and the data center.

All workloads are viewed as a single unit.

So if looking at workloads in isolation causes problems, is it better to migrate every workload and every component of your IT at the same time? Unfortunately, thinking too big is also likely to cause problems. While workloads are interconnected, you still need to find a way to carve them into separate, manageable pieces that can be migrated one at a time.

Make sure your cloud migration doesn’t fail for one of these reasons. The team at Prescient Solutions is a Microsoft Partner with deep experience in Microsoft Azure. Our IT consulting and managed cloud services help businesses in Chicago and Schaumburg complete their migrations and gain the benefits of cloud. Contact us to plan your successful migration to the cloud.