In today’s technology-driven market, migrating to the cloud is an essential precursor to growth. Cloud technology has many obvious benefits. But while pursuing cloud solutions, many businesses often underestimate underlying risks in migration.
Cloud migration can introduce several risks like lack of visibility, data loss, security breaches, and added latency. If you want to switch to the cloud, you must avoid the following 6 risks in cloud migration.
Lack of a Clear Cloud Strategy
Migrating to the cloud is a big decision for your company. So it’s essential to develop a comprehensive cloud migration strategy first. You must choose whether you want multiple cloud providers or a single cloud provider. Selecting either of the two has its pros and cons.
Settling for one provider can lead to the risk of vendor lock-in, making your organization increasingly dependent on the vendor. On the flip side, choosing multiple vendors leads to a greater cost and increased complexity. Each cloud provider will offer different tools for management and services.
According to McAfee, 78% of IT businesses leverage a combination of AWS and Azure to avoid common cloud migration risks. However, for some businesses, the flexibility offered by multi-cloud solutions might not be worth the cost.
At the same time, some companies have to choose between what they leave on their on-premise data centers and what they migrate to the cloud. They may need a hybrid cloud model, which comprises a combination of on-premise data centers and public clouds. Remember, you cannot migrate all your data to the cloud, especially if you belong to an industry with stringent compliance rules.
Solution?
The best approach is not to rush to a cloud provider just because someone you know recommends it. What suits one organization may be ill-suited for your business. You must carefully construct a data migration strategy by asking the following questions:
- Why should I migrate to the cloud?
- What benefits do I seek from cloud migration?
- Does my organization have mission-critical data that has to be stored on-premise?
- What’s capacity does my organization need?
- Do I really need multiple cloud providers, or is one provider enough?
Security
Security risks during cloud migration are easily one of the biggest concerns for CTOs. Organizations have to deal with several problems during cloud migration, which can lead to a number of security risks.
From insecure APIs, accidental errors, insider threats to contractual breaches and malware, misconfigured servers, external attacks, compliance violations, and issues on the provider’s side, cloud migration security risks can cripple any organization.
Some enterprises are aware of all these risks and proactively avoid them. However, most companies don’t know the full extent of security risks cloud migration can pose. As a result, they are ill-prepared when they face these challenges.
Solution?
Top cloud providers such as AWS, Oracle, and Azure enable organizations to buy security as a service. Buying additional services can help companies protect physical assets from unauthorized access. Moreover, these organizations also have the ability to meet compliance requirements of major security organizations such as HIPAA, ITAR, DISA, CJIS, FIPS, and many more.
Likewise, top providers also invest heavily in data security to prevent data loss from cybersecurity threats. At the same time, they can help your organization secure data during the migration process.
With that said, you can still prevent security disasters by relying on IT experts who can provide necessary configurations and ensure that your data is safe in the cloud. Remember the following security considerations during cloud migration:
- Encrypt data assets at rest and in transit
- Enable multi-factor authentication
- Configure user access policies
- Isolate individual workloads
- Set up Firewall
- Implement essential controls
- Train personnel to maintain security in the cloud
Architecture Incompatibility
The complexity of your existing IT infrastructure can create major risks for your company during cloud migration. A significant portion of organizations migrating to the cloud relies on obsolete legacy systems.
These systems, in their raw form, are incompatible for the migration process. You may need to hire additional professionals who have sufficient experience, knowledge, and skills in legacy systems. Before you even begin the migration, you will have to leverage these professionals to make the architecture migration-friendly.
Solution?
One way to resolve architecture incompatibility is to refactor application code to a modern language. For this, you will need an experienced team of IT specialists who can effectively audit the legacy architecture, identify technical debt, and find ways to resolve it while keeping proper documentation.
Data Loss
Data loss is a critical risk during cloud migration. This is why it’s essential for organizations to backup data, especially the files you are migrating to the cloud. Encountering incomplete, corrupt, or missing files is common during cloud migration.
Anything from security breaches to power outages can lead to data loss. So, creating backups guarantees that you can correct errors during data migration and save mission-critical data from being lost.
Solution?
Data loss is one of the biggest cloud migration risks. However, creating efficient backups can allow you to secure critical data without suffering unnecessary delays. Leveraging multiple cloud providers can help reduce downtime during data restoration.
Wasted Costs
75% of IT experts consider cost management one of the biggest challenges to enterprise cloud computing. This issue also reverberates during cloud migration. Cloud providers offer customers diverse pricing models. Although these models are often flexible, they can be overwhelming for beginners, especially if users are leveraging multiple clouds.
Source: Statista
Gartner estimates that enterprises waste 70% of cloud costs. You see, companies are paying for data transfer, computing, and storage. Every cloud provider offers a variety of different transfer options, storage services, and instance types, which change based on performance expectations, cost requirements, and organizational use cases.
Finding the right fit between all these factors can be extremely challenging. Without the expertise of a cloud specialist, it’s tough for organizations to develop an efficient cloud migration plan.
Solution?
This is why it’s essential to optimize costs during cloud migration. If you are not sure how to find cost-cutting measures while guaranteeing smooth migration, consider asking an expert. You can leverage any of the following techniques to reduce wasted costs during a migration.
- Find discounts
- Balance workloads
- Leverage autoscaling
- Delete underutilized instances
- Switch less used storage to cheaper tiers
- Create spending thresholds and set alerts for when you exceed them
- Try hosting in different regions so spend less without delaying the migration process
- Invest in reserved instances
- Take advantage of spot instances for serverless
Increased Latency
Increased latency and performance issues are major cloud migration risks. The reason it is dangerous is that most organizations don’t expect it. Because all your IT infrastructure is in the cloud, it can be harder to access databases, services, and applications with the same speed as on-premise.
This can be a huge problem for organizations offering e-commerce websites and cloud gaming platforms, using IoT devices, or providing video streaming solutions. Increased latency ruins customer experience and eventually leads to loss of business.
Solution?
You can resolve latency issues through the following techniques:
- Establish multi-cloud connectivity and contingencies
- Localize and optimize the network
- Segment traffic flows
- Offload the Internet at the edge
If you can’t afford to experience increased latency, consider switching to mission-critical applications and services on-premise through a hybrid cloud model.
Undoubtedly, cloud technology offers users various benefits, including automation, ease of collaboration, scalability, and flexibility. However, migrating to the cloud also carries several potential risks.
Relying on experienced IT professionals can help you reduce critical cloud migrations risks and ensure that the entire cloud migration process is smooth, efficient, and fast.