The rapid evolution of the digital landscape has driven countless businesses to adopt innovative technology approaches, most prominently Cloud Migration, to leverage its efficiency, agility, flexibility, and scalability. Statistics by Mordor Intelligence have pointed out that the Cloud migration market will reach USD 806.41 billion by 2029 as an increasing number of enterprises will start utilizing this Cloud Migration technology solution down the road.

However, not all companies are well aware of the hard truth that various challenges in Cloud migration, such as technical sophistication or operational difficulty, have also gone hand in hand with its lucrative benefits. Therefore, recognizing these challenges preemptively is paramount to mitigate the risk of unforeseen roadblocks and enhance the efficiency of Cloud Migration initiatives with more ease. 

If you want to stay ahead of other competitors by means of a comprehensive grasp of Cloud migration, come with us to discover the 7 most common Cloud Migration challenges and our valuable solutions to effectively tackle them through today’s article. 

7 most common Cloud Migration challenges

1. Cost management

One of the primary benefits of Cloud migration that springs to your mind might undoubtedly be cost-effectiveness, but this expense aspect, on the other hand, also acts as the root cause for a major concern in the Cloud migration process: cost management.

Although there is little room for doubt that the cloud service can guarantee your cost-effectiveness benefit in the long run, the initial migration cost might be prohibitively expensive. This has acted as an impediment to the cloud migration implementation of several businesses even until now.

In other circumstances, a company might rush into cloud migration without proper planning and fundamental knowledge about this approach as they want to see the cost optimization immediately. Unfortunately, because of this haste, a spiral later cost might be induced.  

2. Legacy system compatibility

Because older legacy systems developers overlook the importance of transitioning to a cloud environment down the road, various companies now are struggling with finding suitable approaches to ensure compatibility between their existing applications, software, and applications and the new, modern target cloud architecture. 

Legacy systems often use proprietary data structures which most cutting-edge cloud platforms no longer support. Moreover, many older systems might also be tightly coupled with certain vendors. All of these, in turn, act as a deterrent to the seamless and efficient process of Cloud Migration. 

3. Data security concerns

Cloud Migration might also give rise to data security and compliance challenges as internal sensitive information might face new vulnerabilities in the new environment.

In this day and age, data, particularly big data, has become the lifeblood of most businesses, being the cornerstone of their success or failures. This, accordingly, emphasizes the utmost magnitude of ensuring data accuracy, consistency, and more importantly, confidentiality. 

If your company outsources a specialized cloud provider, you should make sure that the chosen partner meets security standards and complies with regulations to avoid breaches, fines, and reputational damage. There are a great number of techniques to utilize such as encryption, access controls, security audits, and compliance checks.

4. Undesirable downtime or disruption

Handling indisputable downtime or disruptions due to network connectivity issues or data conversion errors during cloud migration is one of the biggest hurdles businesses face. 

You should know that the network connection within your firm does not rely solely on you, but rather, it’s internet providers that can make changes and decide your internet connection speed. Therefore, it is important for you to carefully choose your partners, otherwise, unstable or unreliable internet connections can hinder data transfer and application performance.

If you are working in the e-commerce field or the service sector at large, this challenge should catch your attention most as your platform migrating its infrastructure to the cloud can not be capable of affording service outages, especially during peak traffic times.

5. Shortage of adequate skill

Cloud Migration is a demanding process, in terms of specialized knowledge, skills, and even financial capacity. Moreover, the accelerated pace of cloud technology necessitates highly skilled IT laborers, so a paucity of adequate and timely training courses on the updates of this technology can result in suboptimal cloud transition, prolonged migration, and in the long run, risks of unexpected errors might come about on a more regular basis. 

In most cases, your current in-house IT team or available infrastructure might not meet the standard of the cloud migration process. This is when you might need to take into account training hiring new competent staff, or outsourcing from a cloud migration services provider. 

While the latter, in general, would cost your company a great deal of money, the latter is deemed to be much more economical for the majority of enterprises with time.

6. Time and resources management

The more enormous your data is, the more time-consuming the process might appear. In case you lack appropriate and deliberate executing plans, The Cloud Migration process could even deprive your resources for other pillar tasks of organizations. 

Specifically for small local or newcomer businesses, although they typically do have not enough resources such as money, these small and new market entrants are often the ones that are most eager to embrace cloud technology. Unfortunately, their insufficient research and resource allocation often result in poor outcomes and significant setbacks. 

7. Long-term strategy alignment

Cloud migration might not always be the best digital solution to empower efficiency for all enterprises. Sometimes, the cloud solution might contradict business objectives and priorities, thereby giving rise to a great number of long-term problems such as business operation disruption, increased superfluous costs, or reduced flexibility.

Therefore, it is necessary to take into serious consideration the compatibility and alignment between the cloud environment and your organization’s lasting strategic plans.

What should you do to tackle these challenges? 

These challenges are undoubtedly commonplace across all industries. The sad news is that you can not comprehensively get rid of them because of the unexpected elements regarding the technology sector. But the good news is that you can put a restraint on its impact on your business through these measures:

1. Detail assessment and planning: 

As we discussed earlier, a relevant, realistic, specific, and suitable strategy will pave the way for a successful and seamless Cloud migration implementation in all businesses. You should not only identify your business objectives in this project but try to compare those goals with the long-lasting ones of your company.

The purpose of the migration could lie in cost-saving, scalability, or efficiency enhancement, but be sure that it perfectly aligns with the industry’s characteristics and is a good fit for your company.  

Furthermore, security requirements and skill assessments should also not be underestimated while planning.

2. Make necessary priorities during migration:

Ask yourself: “Which data or parts of applications need to be transited to the new cloud infrastructure initially?”. Then, prioritize migrating them to optimize the efficiency of your workflow. 

Downtime will take place from time to time, so remember to proactively address it by planning for a phased migration, setting up redundant systems, and migrating during off-peak periods. 

3. Testing in advanced and Migrating gradually:

Testing in sandbox environments can help identify and resolve potential issues before going live. Later on, on a larger scale, the new system will perform more seamlessly. 

The consequences of rushing into cloud migrating are superbly enormous and prolonged. As a result, you should start migrating with less important and core systems to test the compatibility, evaluate precisely, and make prompt adjustments before jumping into proceeding with more pivotal systems.   

4. Regular monitoring: 

Even after migrating, cloud migration challenges might still come about at any time, so close examination and assessment post-migrating would assist businesses in imposing timely limits on disruptions or malfunctions.

Conclusion

Although migrating to a state-of-the-art platform such as the cloud promises magnetic rewards correlated with increased efficiency, cost savings, or scalability, it is also essential to acknowledge the associated challenges. By understanding these obstacles and following our recommended remedies, organizations could better streamline their migration process and restrain adverse impacts on their operations. 

If you still have concerns about these challenges and strive to seek safer, more effective solutions, you might want to consider outsourcing to a trusted cloud migration service provider.

At Luvina Software, we provide such quality services. With a team of 750+ qualified IT engineers capable of offering 24/7 services, we commit to not only helping you tackle challenges with little endeavor, and deliver top-tier cloud migration solutions but also high-quality post-migration support and maintenance.

Contact Luvina now to let us accompany and empower you with our outstanding digital transformation solutions.