Debunking the top 9 myths about moving to cloud

Cloud has been grabbing headlines in IT for many years now, but who would’ve guessed that the COVID-19 crisis would play a major role in determining companies’ near-future IT investment plans? Many sources now indicate that business investments in cloud computing are likely to rise in the aftermath of the global pandemic:

• Gartner has forecasted that IT spending on cloud will accelerate after COVID-19. Last year, cloud made up 9.1% of global enterprise IT spending, and that number is projected to be 14% by 2024.
• A 2020 IBM survey on COVID-19 and the future of business confirmed a renewed emphasis on the need for cloud-based business enablement. According to the survey of more than 3,000 executives, 64% said they have shifted to more cloud-based business activities, and 65% plan to prioritize investments in IoT, cloud and mobility.

Even as the need for cloud-based solutions has been underscored by the events of the past year, numerous myths continue to circulate about the risks and costs of enterprise cloud solutions. Let’s take a closer look at 9 common misconceptions about moving to cloud.

Myth 1: To reap the benefits, we’d have to move everything to cloud.

Cloud doesn’t have to be an all-or-nothing venture. In fact, the promise of flexibility is one of the key advantages of cloud, and cloud will be most beneficial to your organization when you tailor it to your particular workloads and needs. What portion of your data to move to the cloud — a little, a lot or all of it — depends on a whole host of factors:

• What are the demands of those workloads?
• What level of security and performance do you need?
• How resilient must your workloads be?
• What are your data residency requirements?
• How tightly coupled are your applications?

Some organizations might have a goal to go all in on cloud, but for others it will be just a portion of their data and applications. A cloud assessment by an expert can help you determine what workloads in your business are best suited to cloud.

Myth 2: Cloud migration will be disruptive and cost us business.

With the right preparation and expertise, a cloud migration doesn’t need to be disruptive. The truth is, though, migrating workloads to cloud probably won’t be seamless. Big changes rarely are. The important thing is to reduce the risk of disruptions and downtime during the migration. 

 Here are a few suggestions to protect business continuity during a migration:

• Plan carefully before you start. Analyze the potential risks so you go into the migration with eyes open.
• Do the migration incrementally rather than all at once. A gradual migration to cloud will be less disruptive.
• Evaluate your cloud vendor for its cloud footprint and disaster recovery capabilities, as well as migration tooling.
• Automate whatever aspects of the migration you can automate — not only for execution but also for discovery — to take stock of your current estate, to unearth the server interactions and their utilization, and, thereby, to help with estimation and migration planning.
• Plan your actual migration for a time when services demands are lowest. 
• Make sure you have the right expertise, whether in-house or outsourced.

Myth 3: We must acquire all our cloud services from a single company.

The idea that you need to pledge loyalty to one cloud vendor is definitely false. Today, most organizations adopt infrastructure and solutions from diverse vendors. You can work exclusively with one cloud vendor if you want to, but you can also work with a combination of public and private cloud solutions (hybrid) from multiple vendors (multi). No one wants to experience vendor lock-in, so a hybrid multi-cloud approach is becoming the new normal. A recent IBM study suggests that a hybrid platform approach offers 2.5 times more value than a traditional cloud strategy across the areas of business acceleration, developer productivity, infrastructure cost efficiency, compliance and security, as well as strategic optionality.

Myth 4: Once we go to cloud, we can’t go back.

Things are always changing in IT. There are plenty of stories about organizations that rushed to public cloud in the early years of cloud computing only to realize that they needed more control of some of their workloads. They then migrated such workloads back on premises. The cloud journey will be a learning journey; it’s okay to change your mind if something doesn’t go as you expected it to. And, undoubtedly, on-premises infrastructure remains critically important to many organizations. It’s not going to disappear anytime soon. Most of the cloud providers nowadays adopt a hybrid approach, providing easy portability across cloud and on premises by supporting the same technologies across both.

Myth 5: The cloud is less secure, and cloud data is public data.

Security worries have been one of the most often-cited fears around cloud since the very beginning. But cloud service providers have heard these concerns and made significant investments in security innovation — from hiring top cybersecurity talent to multi-layered defence strategies to regulatory compliance. No doubt, reducing cybersecurity threats is a priority in your organization, but that concern can and should be part of your cloud strategy — not a barrier to cloud adoption. While choosing the right cloud vendor with the necessary wherewithal to secure your data and support your compliance needs is paramount, there are some responsibilities on your end as well, such as enabling multifactor authentication, maintaining your own encryption keys, allow-listing your IPs and ensuring the right patch levels on your servers that would do the trick.

Myth 6: Our workloads are too large and complicated for the cloud.

In the past, organizations that wanted to put their big data applications in the cloud faced challenges around bandwidth and control over the data. But times have changed. Today, large and complicated workloads can be run in the cloud, and many enterprises are running large enterprise applications in the cloud. If you have large, complex workloads, you need to work with a cloud vendor that’s experienced with enterprise-grade solutions and has hardware designed for that purpose. There are lots of options to choose from, depending on your specific needs. And some cloud vendors offer a range of cloud services — on the public cloud, behind your firewall or on the edge — thus enabling you to choose the right solution that brings you the maximum value.

Myth 7: Multi-cloud will prevent vendor lock-in.

Vendor lock-in refers to difficulty moving your workloads from one cloud provider to another. This issue could be because of technical, legal or financial restrictions imposed by the vendor. The concept of “multi-cloud” suggests that an organization is already working with multiple vendors. But multi-cloud doesn’t necessarily fully prevent vendor lock-in because one of your cloud vendors could still make it difficult for you to leave or move your data set to another cloud. However, multi-cloud does reduce the risk of any one vendor controlling your future since your workloads are more distributed across vendors. The use of cloud service brokers that help with cross-cloud integration is on the rise. And remember, the RedHat? OpenShift? Platform is a great way to enable multi-cloud portability through the use of container technologies, enabling you to build once and deploy across your entire estate.

Myth 8: By moving to cloud, we won’t need infrastructure or IT.

For most organizations today, it isn’t true that moving to cloud will mean the absolute elimination of IT infrastructure and staff. Regardless of whether you go hybrid or all in on cloud, you’ll still have a need for some infrastructure and IT staff to perform IT management functions. For example, IT staff might support access to cloud services, manage organizational data, make sure your internet infrastructure is reliable and support IT and business strategy. With the adoption of more cloud-based services, they’ll spend less time fixing problems. As I mentioned earlier, on-premises infrastructure will remain important for many organizations, even as they adopt cloud-based solutions for some workloads and applications. There’s no one-size-fits-all IT model. 

Myth 9: We have a cloud migration and implementation strategy.

I saved the strategy myth for last because this one might be a bit provocative. Most organizations think they have a plan for cloud adoption in their business. According to Gartner, though, many companies still don’t truly have a cloud strategy. Very often, cloud solutions were adopted in a haphazard manner, where different departments have sponsored cloud initiatives ad hoc. In some cases, there’s a mandate from the top of the company to move to more cloud solutions but no real plan for doing so. A cloud strategy should be an overarching plan that covers the entire organization — not just a subset or particular business unit. It needs to align tightly with the overall business strategy. And it should identify key objectives, benefits and risks. If you believe you have a cloud strategy, it might be worth challenging yourself to ask if that’s really true.

Myth versus fact

As you can see, there’s more nuance in the cloud space than these common myths suggest. A lot of the simplistic claims comparing cloud to on-premises infrastructure simply aren’t true. The right and wrong answer for your business depends on many factors, and only a thorough assessment will help you determine the right cloud strategy for your organization. Not to mention, the cloud business is highly competitive and evolves quickly based on the demands of the marketplace. Some of the myths that might have once been true about cloud no longer are because the industry responded. As businesses grow their investments in cloud post-COVID, it’s important to separate fact from fiction so you can determine what’s true for your organization and tailor your cloud strategy to your business needs.

 In IBM Services? for Oracle, we regularly work with businesses that want to migrate on-premises Oracle solutions to the cloud. The starting place is often an impact assessment that provides a detailed analysis of what moving an Oracle application to cloud will involve. If you’re an Oracle customer looking to learn more about what migrating to cloud might mean for your business, download our Cloud Impact Assessment ebook.