As the tide of technology is constantly changing, every other business is shifting towards the cloud. Although the cloud technology is safe and secure and saves a lot of time, sometimes things may go south while you are migrating on the servers. Some of the cloud migration challenges businesses face are data loss, added latency, lack of visibility, security breaches, etc. Well, that doesn’t mean that you should avoid migrating to the cloud. There is nothing that can be solved or tackled. In this blog, we will explore the potential threats businesses may face while undergoing the cloud migration process, and how to tackle them. We will also talk about an effective SMB cloud strategy that would help you overcome these challenges.
Risks that involves while initiating the transition-
• No specific cloud migration strategy-
Before deciding whether or not you want to migrate to the cloud, you should question yourself what is better for you? In other terms, you should decide whether one cloud provider would be beneficial for you or you want to opt for Managed IT service provider for multiple cloud platforms. Both of them have their pros and cons. In the first option (one cloud provider), there is a risk involved, and that is vendor lock-in. On the other hand, if you choose to go ahead and opt for the Managed IT Service Provider to manage multiple cloud platforms you would have peace of mind. Although it is expensive and complicated because each service provider offers different services and management tools, it also offers a certain amount of freedom to its users. Some of the common multi-cloud combinations are AWS+Microsoft Azure. According to Cloud Adoption and Risk Report by McAfee, more than 70% of organizations use AWS and Azure to avoid common cloud migration risks.
Also, you must have to decide what you should move from your on-premise servers to the cloud. For doing that, you must have an effective on-premise to cloud migration strategy. You cannot migrate every aspect of your business to the public cloud, especially when you possess sensitive data like financial records. According to the GDPR standards, healthcare and finance organizations are not allowed to move or store their sensitive data on public cloud platforms. These organizations must store their data on physical servers in a specific region. It is understandable why companies who have sensitive data opt for on-premise data centers and avoid using a cloud platform. It gives the companies computing power, flexibility, connectivity, and scalability.
What you can do-
The best course of action that you should follow is not to make an impulsive decision because moving to the cloud can be beneficial to some other business, but it could be disastrous for your business. Without proper planning and an effective Cloud migration plan, you could end up with system failures and expenses. You should consider the following questions before initiating the transition.
• Why do you need to migrate to the cloud?
• What benefits are you aiming to achieve by moving to the cloud?
• What is the capacity that you require?
• The number of cloud providers you need?
• Do you have sensitive data that you need to store on-premise servers?
After considering the above-mentioned questions, you should make a decision.
- Incompatibility of the current architecture
There are several CIOs that claim that the complexity in the current IT architecture is one of the biggest reasons that poses major risks of moving to the cloud. It slows down the migration process to the cloud because it is a tedious task to find people with sufficient IT skills. It is one of the biggest cloud migration challenges because if the entire system is not fit for the cloud, it will slow down the entire process. If the companies have microservices architecture and adapt their containers with the looks like Kubernetes or Docker engine, it is easier to move to the cloud. For this specific reason, Azure and AWS are the best options as it offers specific assistance for Kubernetes as well as other engines that help in the cloud migration process.
What can you do?
Before migrating, you should prepare the entire architecture for the process. The best course of action is to find a skilled team of IT specialists who will audit the legacy architecture, resolve tech debt, figure out interdependent parts, and create profound documentation.
On top of that, if you are willing to create a hybrid environment with a mixture of public and private clouds with on-premise assets, you must redesign your in-house IT infrastructure that will eventually reduce the inconsistencies and interoperability problems between the various systems.
Infrastructure as Code (IaC) is the crucial aspect for the effective cloud migration process of legacy systems. Through this, you can automatically manage the computer networks via scripts, and you will save a lot of time manually configuring them.
- Data Loss-
Before initiating the process of cloud migration, it is vital to create a data backup. You have to make sure to back up the files that you are migrating because you might encounter issues like data corruption, incomplete file transfer, or missing files. Having your data backed up before starting the process, would help you correct any errors by restoring the data in its initial stage.
What can you do?
There are several reasons that you might lose your data. Power outage at a data center or a security breach are some of the examples. If you have backups for all the databases, you can easily retrieve all the files. On top of that, if you are using multiple cloud providers, you do not have to worry about the unexpected downtime of service. You can deploy an independent replica of the applications. Many providers offer cost-efficient storage services, and you can use them for creating the backup. Data backup can save you a lot of time and money while migrating it to the cloud.
- Wasted Costs-
Cloud service providers offer flexible pricing, but seldom it is hard to understand them. Especially if you are new to the field. Brandon Medford and Craig Lowery, analysts at Gartner, estimate that approximately 70% of your cloud costs are wasted. Different cloud vendors offer different pricing that depends on the type of storage services, instance type, and data options keeping in mind your use case, cost requirements, and performance expectations. It is a tedious task to find the best provider for you. Those companies who fail to identify what they need usually waste their money because they only use specific services and do not use the services to the optimum potential.
What can you do?
The best course of action is to optimize the costs. It is a challenging task, and if you struggle to figure out how to do that, you can take guided support from IT experts. The best practices you can rely on are as follows-
• Delete underutilized instances
• Rightsize your workloads
• Take advantage of autoscaling
• Move underused accessed storage to cheaper tiers
• Set reminders for crossing predetermined spend budgets
• Invest in reserved instances for best results
• Make the most out of the discounts
• Added Latency-
Undesirable latency is the most miscalculated risk in the cloud migration process. You may face it when you are accessing applications, databases, and services in the cloud. Latency is bad news especially for IoT devices, e-commerce websites, video streaming solutions, and cloud gaming platforms where seamless customer experience is crucial. If all the applications that must respond immediately started giving delayed responses even for few seconds, then it may pose serious damage to your business. It can impact your brand reputation and causes frustration and disappointments.
What can you do?
To safeguard yourself from latency issues, you must have a deeper understanding of what causes it in the first place. The geographical distance between client and servers, misconfigured Quality of Service (QoS), are some of the examples that cause latency. You can fix this by following several steps-
• Optimize and localize your network
• Segment all the traffic flows
• Rely on multi-cloud connectivity
• Offload the internet
• Connect to specific business partners for data exchanges.
Note that if all of these methods do not work for you or are inexpensive, you can consider keeping those applications on-premise to fix the unwanted latency issues.
• Lack of Visibility and Control
Visibility in the public cloud is among the enormous risks in cloud migration. It hinders the network and overall performance of the application. It is a workable course of action when you are relying on your own on-premise data centers. You have complete control of all your resources that includes physical hosts, networks, and data centers. On the other hand, while migrating to the external cloud services, there would be a responsibility shift because some of the policies move to the external service providers and that depends on the type of service. It results in a lack of the company’s visibility into public cloud workloads.
More than 90% of respondents of a recent survey by Dimensional Research admit that they face network or application performance issues because of visibility problems. In addition to that, 38% agreed that insufficient visibility is one of the biggest factors in application outages, whereas 31% are in-network outages.
What can you do?
Recently, there are so plenty of tools that are available that help in network and application performance monitoring. Many of the cloud service providers and third-party vendors offer several solutions for the issue. Following are prime examples of effective monitoring tools.
• Basic monitoring functionalities without any manual configuration
• Analytics
• Steep learning curve
• Automatic response mechanism
• Configuration of different kinds of alerts
• Seamless integration of monitoring solutions with other solutions
• Security
The complexity around security is one of the biggest risks involved in cloud migration. More than 57% of the companies face this issue, followed by cost and legacy infrastructure. Data migration involves a tremendous amount of security risks. Some prime examples are compliance violations, contractual breaches, insecure APIs, issues on the provider’s side, misconfigured servers, malware, external attacks, accidental errors, insider threats, etc.
Several companies are aware of these security issues, and they work day and night to avoid them or at least reduce the chances. But truth be told, the maturity relating to cloud security of these organizations is still relatively low. Hence, these companies are struggling to fix the security issues because they do not have relevant skills. 92% of respondents of that survey confirms that they must enhance their cloud-security skills, while 84% confirms that they need skilled IT professionals to close the gap. There are only 27% out of the total number of the respondent organizations were confident in their cloud security ability.
What can you do?
Cloud providers like AWS and Azure have known companies that provide security as a service. They make sure that your organization’s physical assets are protected against unauthorized access. The cloud vendors comprise a portfolio that includes ITAR, DISA, HIPAA, CJIS, FIPS, etc. They make aggressive investments in the security domain to make sure that their customers’ data are always protected against cybersecurity issues. Not only that but also they provide robust solutions to safeguard your data and information during the cloud migration process. To be on the safer side, you would still be needing an experienced team of DevOps engineers. You would also need skilled security professionals who ensure that your data is always protected in the cloud by making necessary configurations.
• Configuration of a powerful firewall
• Implementation of necessary controls
• Provide training on how to maintain security
• Isolating individual workloads
• Enable multi-factor authentication
• Encrypt data assets
By Opting for the Best-Managed Service Provider, You Can Avoid Cloud Migration Risks-
There is no denying that cloud migration has several benefits like flexibility, scalability, automation, ease of collaboration, etc. But you should also be aware of the potential risks involved in migrating to the cloud. You can encounter it at any stage as it is presented in all the phases of the cloud migration; you might encounter some of those risks at the initial stages of planning. The complexity of existing infrastructure, vendor monopoly, managing multi-cloud, security, data loss, latency, wasted costs, etc., are some of the common mistakes that make it difficult to move to the cloud. To overcome all these issues, organizations should have phenomenal cloud IaaS skills.
Keeping that in mind, you can simply rely on the stellar services offered by Support Nerds. You can partner with us, and we will help you with the transition without compromising your crucial data. We have a proven experience in the cloud migration process. We are one of the leading companies that provide phenomenal managed IT Services, cybersecurity solutions, cloud migration, and whatnot. We provide you the best on-premise-to-cloud migration, cloud-to-cloud migration as well as multi-cloud and hybrid cloud management solutions. We have a team of skilled and experienced DevOps engineers that help you with Cloud adoption, building and streamlining CI/CD processes, run security checks, detection & prevention (DDOS & intrusion), and more.
The best thing about Support Nerds is that we are a certified partner of AWS, Microsoft Gold, Opentext Services, SAP, etc. We are also the trusted vendors by IAOP, GSA, Inc. 5000, Software 500, Clutch. co, and many more! So, keeping that in mind it is safe to assume that we will provide you phenomenal service and help you with seamless transition.
If you still have any doubts, you can directly connect to us. Our experts will get back to you with lightning-fast speed.