Author
July 25, 2022
The transition from on-premises to cloud environments can provide your business with an array of technological advantages, not the least of which is enterprise architecture modernization. But cloud migration challenges are real – and in some cases, quite daunting – and must be considered as you plan your transition.
The best offense is a good defense. If you understand the cloud migration challenges you can expect to face, you can take steps to prepare for them, minimizing disruption and ensuring a smooth transition. In this post, we’ll examine some of the most common challenges associated with cloud migration and provide some guidelines for minimizing their impact.
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1. Cloud Performance
Cloud environment performance is key to maintaining continuity and minimizing disruptions that can have significant adverse effects. Cloud performance issues are typically related to availability, network latency, or application processing delays.
How to Do it Right
Before your migration process begins, it’s essential to:
- Identify which applications are best suited to cloud migration
- Understand application dependencies
- Make a plan for what you will migrate and when
- Become familiar with cloud integration platforms as they will allow for ideal performance
Make migration decisions based on data flows or business domains – not on which systems provide or receive data. Select technology that delivers the flexibility to migrate what needs migrating and keep other systems in place.
Decoupling data streams in completely isolated containers allows for both vertical and horizontal tuning. This model lets you optimize traffic between points, removing the performance constraints typically associated with cloud migration and putting the focus of analysis on endpoint capacity.
2. Cost Management
Many organizations are facing rapidly climbing cloud costs and cloud waste. It’s vital to carefully manage costs and factor in the duration and complexity of your transition to minimize cloud migration challenges and ensure a solid return on your investment.
How to Do it Right
There are a few ways to control the price of a shift to the cloud:
- Establish a cost management checklist to follow whenever you deploy new services
- Base all organizational cloud usage on your company’s financial policies
- Budget specific amounts for different projects, departments, or categories
- Utilize cost reporting tools from vendors or third parties to ensure consistency
A platform-as-a-service model eliminates the need for upfront infrastructure investments and allows costs to be adjusted to match project scope without compromising the agility or scalability of your solution.
And while traditional cloud vendor tools focus solely on the transition, a cloud based integration system including an enterprise integration platform-as-a-service can simplify your cloud migration process while also laying the groundwork for architecture modernization.
3. Cloud Governance
Control over provisioning, infrastructure delivery, and operations is a major challenge associated with cloud computing because of the complexity involved in properly implementing, using, controlling, and maintaining IT assets. Traditional governance models must be adapted to new environments to enhance security, manage risk, and avoid problems like:
- Poor integration between cloud systems
- Data or effort duplication
- Lack of alignment between systems and business goals
- Inefficient use of resources
How to Do it Right
- Ensure reuse and access standardization to systems, data, and business flows
- Keep cloud usage standards consistent with organizational and industry regulations and compliance requirements
- Align cloud strategy with overall business and IT strategies to ensure cloud systems provide quantifiable support for business objectives
- Maintain clear agreements between all stakeholders so resources are used and shared appropriately
- Implement changes in a consistent, standardized manner
- Rely on monitoring and automation for dynamic response to events
4. Operations Management
The problem of shadow IT and unnecessary use of resources can reduce operational efficiency and security while driving up costs. Robust cloud operations management is needed to help overcome some cloud migration challenges. Service level agreements define expected performance levels, but continual monitoring is necessary to ensure SLAs are upheld as infrastructure components change. Processes and checks must be implemented before code is deployed to production, and security requirements and access controls put in place.
How to Do it Right
Choose a cloud migration partner or solution that can provide the tools you need to manage operations, including:
- Active monitoring with execution control, error handling, and reprocessing rules
- Easy-to-use dashboard
- Logging and alert capabilities
- API management support for the creation, security, management, and sharing of APIs
- Ability to interact with existing ITSM tools to send logs, events, and metrics to central monitoring, email addresses, or messaging applications
5. Observability
Observability enables administrators to gather internal and external data on networked resources to monitor and understand their behavior, investigate anomalies, and improve performance and uptime. But this can be challenging in a cloud environment, given the massive volume of data and components in cloud architecture.
How to Do it Right
Make sure the observability tools you select provide the following:
- Integration with existing tools and support for necessary frameworks and languages
- User-friendly interface to ensure they are used correctly and regularly
- Real-time insights through dashboards, reports, and queries to ensure teams can quickly understand issues and their impacts
- Support for modern event handling and context techniques
- Visual presentation for rapid comprehension and action
6. Cloud Security
As with governance, the controls and practices developed to secure on-premises environments can’t always meet the requirements of cloud-based systems – and relying on legacy security systems can introduce new risks to your operations due to:
- Increased attack surface (public cloud has become a large, attractive target for cybercriminals)
- Insecure interfaces and APIs
- Lack of visibility and tracking, which can lead to reduced protections
- Workload flexibility – traditional tools can’t handle dynamic environments
- DevOps, DevSecOps, and automation (appropriate controls must be identified early in the development cycle to avoid security gaps or delays)
- Granular permissions and keys management, which can give the wrong users dangerously high access levels
- Complex environments made up of public cloud, private cloud, on-premises deployments, and edge protection
How to Do it Right
Mission-critical resources should be deployed in logically isolated areas, and dedicated WAN links and enterprise-defined static routing configurations used to customize access to devices, networks, gateways, and public IP addresses.
Secure all distributed cloud applications and automatically update WAF rules when there is a measurable change in traffic. Be sure to apply and enforce all security policies and processes consistently.
Employ encryption at every level of data transport, and deploy software that can detect, identify, and remediate threats in real-time.
Avoid Cloud Migration Challenges with Digibee
Digibee’s unique cloud native iPaaS for enterprise model helps minimize the risk that these common cloud migration challenges will disrupt migration and architecture modernization processes, ensuring that your digital transformation is smooth and seamless. Our solution isn’t just about moving your data and processes to the cloud. We help future-proof your operations so you’re ready for anything – including competing in a digital-first world.
Learn more about how you can overcome cloud migration challenges with Digibee’s iPaaS solution – Request a demo with our team.
