Mistakes moving to cloud: the stakes get higher
There are many articles around concerning migrations to the cloud and various forms of advice on how to move to cloud, planning considerations when migrating workloads, cloud vendor checklists, design frameworks and generally lots of useful points to consider and various things companies should be doing and thinking about in their move.
Virtually all enterprises have some sort of cloud presence already with nearly everyone using public cloud. Flexera’s 2020 state of the cloud report* quantify these adoption rates as high as 98% of their survey respondents using at least one public or private cloud and 96% utilising at least one public cloud.
Despite such high adoption rates only 3 in 10 of Enterprises today have already moved their core systems to cloud. According to Microsoft commissioned Forrester Research earlier this year, 70% of Microsoft’s own Azure Enterprise customers have not yet moved there critical or core systems to cloud. With the stakes being much higher for mission critical systems, I thought it would be useful to consider mistakes made rather than just looking at all the things we should be doing.
Most organisations already have some experience from moving Apps and workloads to cloud and many have already endured pain points and challenges. By considering some of the most common mistakes that organisations have made, CIOs and IT directors can watch out for these when combining with their own experiences. CIO magazine explore a number of the common mistakes made: these include failing to align cloud and business strategies, not fully understanding the complexities and the risks of IT, underestimating costs, failing to integrate and test correctly and trying to do it alone were all described as being the main mistakes organisations have made.
Frost & Sullivan also cite a number of common areas for problems that have resulted from a lack of clear cloud roadmaps. Many IT leaders are today struggling to assess the optimal deployments options for each of their applications after a decade of different factors influencing deployment decisions made about their cloud services and are now trying to fit this myriad of existing solutions, commitments and previous courses of action into a coherent future strategy. Many organisations did not fully plan exit strategies and are now facing more vendor lock-in than they would like which resulted from following a ‘set it and forget it’ type approach.
Although previous migrations to the cloud were planned, the impact to the rest of the organisation and the lack of expertise on hand, at a time when the pace of technology is fast has left many with a lack of sufficient staff cloud experience that was required to implement the necessary changes effectively for their digital transformation.
Although nearly all [93%] of businesses did engage with some sort of third-party assistance to help during their design, implementation and management of cloud, problems still resulted. Bringing in the right expertise for the project can bring in the breadth and depth of relevant experience. Experience needs to be backed by market tested methodologies in order to lead to a more successful cloud migration. The most common sources of help were provided by their Cloud Service Provider, Cloud Platform Provider, Managed Services Provider, IT vendor or their Security Service provider.
However when moving core systems and applications to the cloud, expertise should also be sort from the System/Applications Partner as there will be specific intricacies and inter-dependencies required for such complex applications that will make a difference between a successful optimised core system in the cloud and one fraught with inefficiencies and poor performance.
https://info.flexera.com/SLO-CM-REPORT-State-of-the-Cloud-2020
Further Reading
https://www.dhirubhai.net/pulse/you-ready-move-your-critical-workloads-cloud-yet-david-penny/
https://www.dhirubhai.net/pulse/analysts-say-private-cloud-quadruple-over-next-5-years-david-penny/