What mistakes should you avoid when migrating to the cloud?

Not having a defined strategy with specific objectives can lead to confusion,?delays,?and exceeding budget.?Define what you want to achieve with the migration and how it aligns with your business goals.

Choosing the right public cloud provider is a strategic decision that could impact your IT infrastructure and operations in the long term. It's important to carefully assess your top business priorities before researching and comparing different providers (AWS, Azure, GCP, etc.). Understand each provider's offerings of services and consider if they will accommodate both current & future requirements of your company's cloud strategy (scalability, regions, pricing models, your staff's proficiency with X provider). It's also important to evaluate the potential for vendor-lock in and explore options like multi or hybrid cloud if it makes sense for your infrastructure planning.

Cloud environments have different security considerations.?Develop a robust security plan and ensure compliance with relevant regulations before,?during,?and after migration.

One topic that comes up frequently with my customers that migrated their applications to the public cloud is mitigating security risks post-migration. During the pandemic, the move to public cloud was accelerated with a lot of companies migrating their workloads to the cloud without a clear security strategy in place. In other words, networking & devops were usually already working in the cloud without fully evaluating how to secure their new distributed infrastructure. Risks that can occur from a rushed migration without a thorough security assessment can include unsecured data transfer, compliance issues against data privacy laws, and potentially an increased attack surface.

A common problem I see that leads to rollbacks of cloud migration projects is unexpectedly high costs due to lack of optimization for the cloud. First, most cloud providers offer cost estimation tools and calculators to help forecast your expenses more accurately based on your specific needs. Use them. Regularly review and adjust your resource usage based on actual needs. Also, utilize autoscaling features to adjust resources automatically in response to actual demand. Ultimately, you don't want to over-pay, but you don't want to over-constrain cloud resources, as that leads to suboptimal performance. Monitor and tune your workload on-prem before you migrate. That gives your project the greatest chance for success.

Lift-and-shift migration is seen as the simplest and quickest way to move applications to the cloud, but it often comes with its own set of consequences down the line. For example, while initial costs of migration might be lower than refactoring your application, lift-and-shift often doesn't leverage the full potential of cloud features like auto-scaling and on-demand resources. Essentially, this can lead to higher long-term costs if companies don't take advantage of cloud based resource elasticity and continue to host their applications the same way as traditional on-prem data centers.

Have a backup before migration, have a backup during migration, have a backup after migration. It’s imperative you have multiple copies of your data in case of (inevitable) issues.

In my experience, overlooking the importance of governance, monitoring, and management of cloud resources. What has been my solution recommendation for this is to establish proper governance frameworks, including policies, procedures, and controls for cloud resource provisioning, usage, and monitoring. Lastly, implement cloud management tools to track resource utilization, cost management, and compliance.

Be clear on what to keep in Cloud . Avoid multiple copies on cloud. Ensure your security compliance before moving in.Migrate non-critical workloads first to gain experience and identify potential challenges before moving larger applications.