One of the biggest challenges of any cloud migration project is how effectively the migration risks are identified and mitigated. The possible risks and drawbacks must definitely not be ignored. In the Seven Step Model of Cloud Migration, the step of testing includes efforts to identify all the key migration risks.
The cloud migration risks fall into two broad categories: General migration risks and Security migration risks. In general migration risks, we address several issues including:
- Several legal compliances that migration strategy and implementation need to be fulfilled – this include obtaining the right execution logs and retaining the right audit trails
- Issues of consistent identity management
- Problems are due to several shortcomings in current cloud computing service vendors
- Matters of multi-tenancy and impact of IT data leakage
- Performance monitoring
- Identifying all possible production level deviations
- Business continuity and disaster recovery
- compliance with standards and disaster issues
- Internet Protocol and licensing issues
- Quality of service parameters and corresponding SLAs
- Ownership, transfer, and storage of data in the application
- Portability and interoperability issues
On the other hand, i.e. security front, the risks of migrations are plenty which are:
Possible Risk of Cloud Migration
- If your application is retrieving and storing sensible information, the thought of migration your important data might not be a better solution. On the other hand, compliance requirements can also restrict your choice of migration.
- Your clients as well as you might fear unknown challenges.
- Your architecture and design of application might not completely follow the distributed architecture of cloud. You possibly need to do some modifications in your applications.
- Some operations may also suffer from added latency using cloud application over the internet.
- If technologies you are using in business or workplace is proprietary, you may not be legally able to deploy in the cloud.
- If everything you are using is running perfectly fine, or you are satisfied with your existing setup, no need to demand much maintenance, scaling and availability. If your customers and clients are happy we suggest don’t mess with it.
These points must be considered to mitigate all your risks of cloud migration and you can also make a strong strategy and plan for migrating and also no need to shift all the data and workloads initially. You can start by migrating only those applications that are not much used and later shift other workloads when you are completely comfortable with the new platform.
You can also read our article on cloud Migration checklist which organizations kept in mind before shifting whether it is small size business or medium size business.