The reasons for moving business applications to the cloud are plentiful. However, along with the pluses come some minuses. Unfortunately, organizations can run into roadblocks during their migration projects. The critical question is why? As with many business-critical projects, the devil is in the details. 

The most common points of failure that contribute to issues with cloud migrations are an inability to align business with IT, improperly setting performance expectations, and a lack of retooling of the organization to support the target architecture.  

The Importance of Aligning Business and IT

One of the biggest speed bumps to a successful cloud migration is the failure to obtain sufficient business buy-in. It’s critically important to achieve alignment between business and IT stakeholders in order to ensure a positive outcome. Getting the right executive level sponsorship for a cloud migration project is key to securing the resources and cooperation needed to overcome any challenges.

Properly Setting Performance Expectations

If your assumption is that once you’ve migrated to the cloud your system performance will automatically be the same, then you may be in for a rude awakening. Some workloads simply won’t perform as well in the cloud environment, such as ERP systems, while Web and email servers are excellent candidates for migration. This is why it’s important to identify which applications are cloud ready prior to the migration

Another reason cloud migrations go bad is that expectations are not always properly set. For instance, if you are expecting controls that were in place in a non-cloud environment to be available in cloud, you may be disappointed, which is why setting proper expectations is crucial.

Change in Target Architecture Requires Changing Support Capabilities

With your migration, your target architecture is going to change, requiring different capabilities to support the environment. Your management monitoring eco-system will likely require retooling, as will rethinking how people and processes will be impacted by the change. For example, you will have to rethink how you support-ticket an incident and all the service management functions that go along with cloud.

5 Steps to Avoid Migration Failure

  1. First and foremost, get organizational buy-off
  2. Foster collaboration between business and IT
  3. Develop a comprehensive cloud migration strategy and roadmap
  4. Analyze, design, assess – determine which are the best workloads to move to cloud
  5. Identify the people, processes and tools you need to successfully pilot your migration