December 20, 2022
A top 2023 priority for your organization is to move to the cloud to achieve long-term benefits of cost savings, flexibility and scalability, enhanced security, and simplified management and monitoring. According to Gartner, “by 2025, 85% of enterprises will have a cloud-first principle”. If you are starting the cloud journey, you need to understand the migration challenges and have plans to avoid or mitigate them, so your organization achieves the promised cloud benefits.
Your IT staff is stellar but are they prepared for cloud migration? Have they done this before and understand how to develop the pre-and post-cloud plans? You may need to invest in tools and upfront training, and skill-building for your team to ensure success. Another option is contracting with an outside migration partner with experience in cloud migrations, which may save you money and ensure the migration is done efficiently.
The quickest way to move to the cloud is often the “lift and shift” migration strategy. Ultimately, this may result in higher cloud operating costs after migration. Reviewing your critical applications, performing an in-depth application assessment before the move, and determining the “right” strategy to modernize or replace reduces technical debt and ongoing cloud costs.
In a rush to move to the cloud, your team may not fully assess the data center workloads to be migrated. Without performing the pre-cloud analysis, it can result in incomplete specification of migration requirements and downstream scope creep.
Failing to properly architect and implement the underlying cloud “landing zone” environments into which workloads are migrated can increase security and compliance costs.
Failing to discover and account for the interdependencies between on-premises systems being moved can result in incorrect grouping and order of application migrations, network performance issues, and cascading delays.
Accounting for all the costs of cloud migration can be challenging. Your team needs to identify and account for organizational transformation costs and the residual or sunk costs of vacated data center capacity that need to be absorbed into your organization’s budgets. Calculating the total effort should include all activities associated with cloud adoption, including strategic planning, workload migration, and application modernization.
Cloud strategy migration planning is critical, including getting participation and obtaining support from key business, technical, and leadership stakeholders. Contact us to help you start or review your plan to identify and avoid pitfalls. We provide that outsider view to ensure you achieve your cloud goals before and after migration.