Cloud computing offers businesses a wide range of potential benefits such as higher productivity, easier scalability, greater flexibility, improved cost-effectiveness and more.
Those that still haven't made this transition are moving quickly to catch up or expand their use of these tools. In 2020, 61% of businesses migrated workloads to the cloud, while global spending on enterprise cloud platforms is expected to increase by 23% in 2021 to reach $332.3 billion.
However, undergoing a cloud migration is a challenging task. The cost of failure can be high, and problems may be more common than you think. According to the Cloud Security Alliance, 90% of CIOs have experienced failed or disrupted data migration projects, with the complexity of these being a major issue.
Meanwhile, 74% of companies have moved applications back to on-premises from the cloud. This means more downtime and wasted investments, and can result in businesses being more wary of cloud deployments in the future.
So how can you minimize the risk of falling victim to this? Here are a few cloud migration challenges you may encounter and what you can do about them.
One of the first mistakes many firms make when adopting cloud computing is going into the migration without a clear plan in place. Before you embark on steps like comparing providers, you need to know exactly what your current infrastructure looks like, which workloads you'll prioritize for migration and how much downtime you can expect. A clear timetable that includes KPIs for measuring success can help you see if you're on track.
Learn more: 7 Steps to Build and Execute Your Cloud Strategy Roadmap
There are several options for transferring workloads to the cloud, and it's vital you understand the pros and cons of each before committing to a plan. For example, a 'lift and shift' approach that migrates workloads essentially unchanged from an on-premise data center to the cloud is often the quickest option, but it may not take full advantage of cloud technology. On the other hand, rearchitecting your workloads to build a cloud-native solution may be more beneficial in the long run, but you'll have to determine whether it's worth the extra time and expense involved.