Top 5 challenges when migrating to the cloud

March 8, 2024

Firstserv’s Sebastian Tyc outlines the risks of migrating to the cloud and how to best approach them

Cloud computing is seeing an inexorable rise as organisations worldwide continue to transition more services online.

The trend towards hybrid working, accelerated by the COVID-19 pandemic, has resulted in a huge increase in migrating to the cloud. Gartner research and consulting services firm recently forecast worldwide public cloud end-user spending to grow 21.7% to $597.3 billion in 2023.

While cloud adoption has its challenges, it is vital to protect against cybercrime. Experts like Firstserv can guide organisations through the process, ensuring a smooth transition.

“At Firstserv, we have enabled many organisations to realise their cloud ambitions using our Cloud Adoption Framework. We springboard workloads safely from legacy on-premises data centres to cutting-edge public, private and hybrid cloud environments.”

Using the Cloud Adoption Framework, Firstserv seamlessly navigates the challenges faced by organisations taking the plunge.

Data security and compliance risk

Data security and regulatory compliance are major concerns as organisations move to the cloud. Data and applications hosted on the cloud must be secured at the same level as on-premises data centres. Some cloud deployment models are better suited to this than others.

For example, a company shares servers and other infrastructure with other cloud customers in public cloud deployments. Vulnerabilities in the underlying servers or the isolation of the virtual machines (VMs) hosted on these servers could result in data leakage or other security incidents.

Additionally, an organisation may not have visibility into where its data and applications are hosted, which can be problematic for some data privacy laws, such as the General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR).

In addition to managing these risks, Firstserv will carry out a Cloud Assessment to evaluate redundant workloads that can be merged, ensuring more optimised costs in the future. Migrating to the cloud is more cost-effective than maintaining and managing a legacy on-premises infrastructure.

Unnecessary project spend

The most common mistake preventing organisations from fully reaping the benefits of the cloud is the lack of clear business objectives behind the move and/or a good migration plan.

Clients approach us after attempting cloud migration in-house, having already undertaken a great deal of work. In these cases, we often must go back to square one, helping formulate business goals and rebuild migration strategies from scratch.

A solid strategic plan ensures that you can easily navigate the transition and avoid analysis paralysis during later stages. This is especially important given the variety of choices along the way, starting from whether you opt for private, public, or hybrid cloud infrastructure to choosing between Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS), Platform as a Service (PaaS), or Software as a Service (SaaS) models.

Carefully planning each phase of the migration ensures that companies make the right choices, arrive at their target, and avoid unnecessary spending.

Skills gap

One of the primary challenges of migrating to the cloud is finding people with the skills to manage an effective migration. Despite the many benefits of cloud computing, the project’s complexity stops many organisations in their tracks.

Competition for migration experts has intensified. Unfortunately, the demand for cloud experts exceeds the supply, at least for now.

Firstserv’s team fills an organisation’s skills gap, enabling a seamless transition to the cloud without having to upskill, increase, and potentially decrease the current headcount.

Cloud migration complexity

Cloud migration involves moving data storage and applications from on-premises environments to cloud infrastructure. Often, this is accomplished in stages to ensure that one step is completed entirely successfully before moving on.

If an organisation has a complex IT architecture, developing and executing a cloud migration strategy may be difficult.

Certain systems may need to be collocated, and a complex architecture may make it challenging to identify and document interdependencies and develop a phased strategy for moving specific components or systems to the cloud.

Firstserv’s experience in providing managed solutions and secure cloud hosting, including disaster recovery, managed backups, and server monitoring, ensures the security of an organisation’s system during the migration project and beyond.

Resistance to cloud adoption

Regarding cloud adoption, the biggest challenge is not technology but people. We all tend to resist change, and migrating to the cloud brings a lot of change and disruption. Teams need to adapt and change their working processes.

Good people management is extremely important to ensure a successful migration. A properly thought-out change management plan can assist in this transitional journey.

Buy-in from the top level is crucial, heavily influencing employee engagement and adoption. By demonstrating support, excitement, and value for the new project, the leadership team will help disseminate these values to the rest of the team.

Constant communication encourages the workforce to adapt and progress. Investing in a strong onboarding programme and employing experts like Firstserv to train and support employees will ensure employee acceptance faster.

Embrace innovation, move to the cloud

Moving to the cloud is not a challenge but rather an opportunity to make existing business processes more agile and innovative.

Firstly, they can take stock of all the infrastructure components, business processes and in-house expertise at their disposal. Then, build a strategy that encompasses their organisation’s needs on their cloud migration journey. Firstserv can help develop and execute a cloud migration strategy that makes the most sense from the standpoint of businesses’ own objectives.

Based on an organisation’s actual and target digital maturity levels, our experts customise the migration programme for the organisation’s processes, people, and technologies.

Book a free one-hour consultation to see how Firstserv can help you migrate to the cloud faster and achieve scale optimisation.