According to a recent Spiceworks survey, small businesses expect to run 53% of their workloads in public clouds by 2021. They are all seeking benefits such as reducing operational costs while increasing flexibility, security and agility for growth in the cloud. But achieving the benefits of cloud migration for SMBs is not an overnight journey, and it begins with the inexact science of cloud migration. For further support please visit at IT Services in Houston
Every aspect and step of cloud migration has several known challenges with each cloud provider having strengths and weaknesses when it comes to hosting an application. There are also several migration challenges your small business may not have considered that can stand in the way of reaping the benefits of migrating workloads to the cloud. Here are five challenges you should consider before starting your journey.
#1. The Potential Need for Cloud Repatriation
SMBs moving applications to the public cloud find changing applications, compliance and access needs, and other factors like increasing costs make it necessary to move the application back to in-house servers or to a different cloud provider. This repatriation process is becoming more common as SMBs to enterprises find that not every workload will continue to deliver the same benefits over time in the original cloud location.
#2. Lack of Clarity on What to Move to the Cloud
Although some applications are recognized as ideal targets for cloud migration and others take more work to make them cloud ready, small businesses still struggle with the decision process of what to move to the cloud. This is often because they lack a clear cloud strategy that helps them decide on whether an application is best suited to an IaaS, PaaS or SaaS model. Then there are challenges arising from a lack of experience in the migration process itself, which makes choosing and preparing workloads for migration risky business.
#3. Not Understanding the Migration Process
Many businesses do not understand when, how, and for what workloads are being used. They also lack clear understanding of when applications are interacting with other applications and what databases they rely on. Although there are tools to help with this application dependency mapping, experience in choosing among them and using them can be the difference between success and failure that can cost the business time, money, and operational continuity.
Lack of proper understanding of application mapping is often tied to a lack of understanding of the different cloud providers and choosing the right instance (preconfigured virtual servers from providers). Other challenges stemming from a lack of experience in the cloud migration process include determining which applications:
- Can be simply shifted to the cloud (rehosting)
- Require a significant amount of code re architecting (refactoring).
- Cannot be moved at all
#4. Monitoring, Managing and Controlling Cloud Spend
Although businesses anticipate the savings that can come from moving workloads to the cloud, they’re often not quite prepared for the complexity of tracking, controlling and reducing spending. The #1 priority for over 60% of businesses running public cloud services is to reduce wasted spend (2019 RightScale State of the Cloud Report).
Infrastructure as a service (IaaS) more commonly referred to as public cloud may be a pay-as-you-go model, but cloud pricing and billing across providers varies and is very complex with countless price points and line items. Once a business migrates applications and workloads to the cloud, they aren’t always prepared to rightsize the instances so they aren’t over provisioning or under provisioning. The former leads to major and uncontrolled cost overruns and the latter can mean applications and workloads won’t run.Please for more visit at IT Services in Houston.
#5. Overlooking Security or Compliance Needs
Many organizations overlook or misunderstand the shared security mode when they migrate workloads to the cloud. Under the Shared Responsibility Model, the cloud provider is responsible for “security of the cloud” (hardware, software, networking, and facilities that run the cloud services.
Your business is responsible for “security in the cloud” which includes how they configure and use the cloud provider resources. Cloud providers do make security tools available, but it’s up to the business to choose and configure them. In other words, it’s your responsibility to encrypt and secure your own data.
There are tools and methodologies to overcome these and a host of other challenges a small business will encounter with cloud migration. The overriding challenge is that most small businesses have a very steep learning curve to understanding and using those solutions effectively. Most small businesses lack the IT support needed to keep up with the entire migration process while keeping their internal IT infrastructure running. For further assistance please visit us at IT Services in Houston.
The ideal scenario is to have the support of a cloud migration services provider with deep experience in all types of cloud migration projects. This includes having the experience with the best tools and methodologies to handle all the challenges that can come up along the way.
They can also partner with your business through cloud consulting services to develop a cloud strategy vision beyond immediate cloud needs to future needs and opportunities. This will enable the business to reap the benefits of cost savings, scalability, operational efficiency and innovation that will be the foundation for growth and digital transformation. For More please visit us at IT Services in Houston.