Companies worldwide are moving their legacy applications to the cloud due to the pandemic. While reducing infrastructure costs and improving security are still important reasons for many, it is essential to assess your unique business environment to understand why cloud migration is crucial to you. 

 Cloud migration must be smooth and easy to be effective. Adopting the cloud has tangible benefits - Gartner1 confirms that more than 70% of companies have already moved some of their workloads to the public cloud. However, it predicts that 60% of infrastructure and operations managers could experience cost overruns by 2024, hurting their facility's budgets. 

According to a Cloud Security Alliance2 report, 90% of CIOs have experienced failures or disruptions in data migration projects due to the intricacy of moving from on-premises environments to the cloud. 35% of those who responded to the survey reached the moving deadline. A 2019 Fortinet study found that 74 percent of enterprises moved their applications back on-premises because they were not achieving the desired revenue. 

This brings us to the most important questions - why do these migrations fail, and what can you do to ensure a successful cloud migration? And most importantly, why is cloud migration mandatory for organizations?  

Advantage Cloud - Why Migrating from Legacy Systems to the Cloud is Important for an Organization 

 Migrating to the cloud has several advantages, as it provides businesses with much-needed flexibility and scalability. The Coca-Cola Company achieved 40% operational savings by reducing maintenance costs and improving performance by moving to the cloud. 

Cloud-based startups collect customer and market data to align their offerings and implement product updates during production. Many want to add or remove features based on customer feedback, such as SaaS. Subscription-based models that enable marketing teams to interact more with end users and changes in marketing, sales and pricing, and customer support functions have proven extremely valuable. 

End-user spending on cloud services will grow from $396 billion in 2021 to $482 billion in 2022, according to Gartner. Brandon Medford, a senior analyst at Gartner, explains: "Organizations are advancing their timelines. Digital business initiatives and the race to the cloud, trying to modernize environments, improve system reliability, support hybrid work models and respond to other new realities forced by the pandemic. 

To fulfill the new retail tasks, the most prominent American grocery chain Kroger recently released a privacy-compliant collaborative cloud that provides detailed insights into customer behavior. 

Planning for successful cloud migrations 

Cloud migration requires a lot of planning to ensure a positive impact on business and operations. 

When Netflix decided to move to the cloud, most people didn't know the cloud existed. But he had problems that required immediate attention, so came his famous Simian army to save the Chaos Monkey. It is a software tool developed by Netflix engineers that simulates cloud event failures and tests Amazon Web Services (AWS) resilience and recovery. 

Proper planning is the key to a successful migration and should consider various aspects of the present and the future. Remember to build your cloud for the future by anticipating growth and new business models. A simple "lift and change" may work for some, while others may require a complete overhaul of the application architecture. To avoid downtime and performance degradation, you need to understand cloud migration best practices.

But before you start anything, you have to ask the right questions. Why do you want to move to the cloud, and what do you expect? Is your workforce ready for this change? What transition strategies are suitable for your business? 

Here are some mistakes you must avoid to ensure a smooth cloud migration. 

Inability to understand the organization's networks and infrastructure. 

Each solution provider offers unique capabilities, making it difficult for companies to choose solutions based on their business and information needs. A lack of proper understanding causes disruptions in systems, and some information may be left behind. This disrupts operations and leads to additional costs and frustration. 

For example, Sime Darby Industrial Sdn Bhd (SDISB) faced scalability and security issues due to configuration limitations of cloud infrastructure. Regular delays and downtime caused by these mismatches caused significant disruptions that increased the company's costs. A customized end-to-end partner solution is needed to help SDISB to improve the performance of its cloud-based e-commerce website. 

Trying to migrate everything at once 

When migrating data and workflows, simply taking a "live and change" approach to migrate workloads without modifying or analyzing them may not be the best choice. You may need to rewrite and republish applications from the cloud or replace them as appropriate. Before starting a migration project, the company must estimate the workload.  

Furthermore, each storage and solution has advantages and limitations that must be evaluated, and proper backup strategies would play a vital role. Organizations like OVHcloud, Europe's largest cloud service provider, had already taught us how to save data the hard way when its data center suffered a catastrophic fire. The backup and recovery services provided by the company could continue operating while others suffered. 

The right immigration partner can play a crucial role here. Field resistance or minimum viable cloud should give a realistic transition picture. This minimum possible cloud eliminates the risk of losing important data or causing disruptions or breaches due to ineffective migration. 

Lack of the right migration partner 

The migration partner you choose will largely determine the success of your cloud migration. Instead of picking them based on familiarity or low price, you should focus on their experience. Partnered with certified cloud solutions experts, you need a design that fits your business, not a specific technology. Handing the migration project to internal teams is only possible if the team has the appropriate prior experience and knowledge. 

You can ask your migration partner for a cost proposal and necessary recommendations after adequately assessing your data and infrastructure to start the project on the right track. 

Dependency mapping failure 

Incomplete application evaluation also leads to dependency bottlenecks. You must find and satisfy dependencies between local systems early to avoid failures. Failure to do so would lead to incorrect grouping and sequencing of application migrations, resulting in increased costs and consequent delays. It also causes ongoing performance issues and incurs transmission costs.

Ignoring Hidden Costs 

You must pay close attention to the costs associated with change, including raises, salary increases for cloud management roles, changes in organizational structure, operating methods, new policies, etc. 

Adobe found this the hard way in 2018 when its designers realized that a single computing job in Microsoft Azure was racking up $80,000 daily. A week later, it accumulated a bill of more than half a million dollars. 

Regardless of costs, budgeting should include indirect project costs to ensure optimal organizational performance without financial strain. 

Additional Care Needed to Migrate Legacy Applications to the Cloud Safely 

 Migrating legacy applications to the cloud becomes easier when you analyze the complexity of different data types and applications. For example, moving a company's email service to a public SaaS cloud service is quite simple. Challenging transition is an application developed years ago. If your entire business depends on it, it can make things more difficult. 

Internally developed custom applications can not match new cloud offerings. A classic case is Autodesk's SaaS offering, which uses only one software version and is not compatible with custom third-party applications or add-ons. In addition, companies with unique ERP applications often struggle with cloud solutions that cannot accept such personal versions. Organizations can avoid this confusion by choosing one of these options to ensure a safe and quick transition. 

• Infrastructure-as-a-Service (IaaS), where applications can be adapted as-is or with minor modifications to run on a service provider's infrastructure. 
• Platform-as-a-Service (PaaS) provides organizations with a secure database or development environment to install and manage custom applications or code. 
• Software-as-a-Service (SaaS) provides customized services to organizations for cost-effectiveness, scalability, and flexibility.

The right migration partner will help you with the right cloud solutions and strategies and even provide customized solutions to ensure a successful migration. The infamous data scraping breach or breach that cost Facebook huge losses, including a $5 billion fine, taught us important lessons about cloud security. 

No matter which transfer partner you choose, make sure they have security in mind. Security cannot be an afterthought and is the only way to reduce the attack surface and resulting breaches. Ensure you maintain regular patches and updates, properly configure cloud-based solutions, and secure your network for vulnerability management and incident response. 

Conclusion

Our Trigent domain experts assess your portfolio and business needs to identify challenges and ways to address them. As cloud migration experts, we combine unique methodologies with purpose-built assessment tools to determine the correct migration strategy for your business. That's why we create a detailed transformation plan that prioritizes applications and treatments based on best practices which will simplify your cloud migration journey.