Cloud Computing has become one of the most important and crucial element if every small or big enterprise. Moving your data and applications to infrastructure-as-a-service such as AWS is a priority of all the organizations globally.
One of the biggest challenge faced by enterprises and small business is building cloud migration into overall IT business strategy. A right plan and decision are required to succeed in this virtual world.
The advantages of cloud computing are many but everything comes with a risk. Coming on what are the major problems and risks of cloud migration, here are the top five factors which must be considered when moving your services or applications to the cloud.
- Security
- Downtime
- Control
- Migration
- Change
Migration from traditional on-premise models to cloud computing is a painful journey and also require some brainstorming and costs you money. We will be discussing each and every factor in detail.
Security
Security is the major problem as security is traditional system is completely different from that of the cloud. It is true that best cloud providers provide you better cloud services and security than that of an in-house implementation.
At a reasonable cost, cloud service providers have made the investments to provide infrastructure, tools, and software that provide with highest levels of privacy and security certifications.
Not all your data can be shifted to the cloud environment, it should be kept in mind that those applications that use confidential data should not be sifted initially.
You should always look for the solutions that provide data encryption on the move and at the rest. Also look for properly implemented, robust and along with that access management systems. For key management, try to put all the processes in place and use multifactor authentication.
Migration
Before migration, there should be proper planning and goals of migration must be clear. Your migration must be successful when you have a clear and solid understanding of your business requirement, application dependency mapping, and a good implementation plan.
The best way to mitigate the risk of migration is that you can engage a partner who is experienced and has a good project management skills with solid understanding of successfully migrate to the cloud platform.
Downtime
When you are using best cloud migration strategy for your company along with your IT professionals, you expect that your system will have minimum downtime. But at the end, everyone fears for this but thanks to widely publicized reports about downtime events which cloud providers handle themselves.
Control
The biggest question which arises when shifting to a different environment is that who actually control your data – you or your cloud service provider. This is the biggest risk of cloud migration as at the end data needs to be confidential.
It should be noticed what access do they have to your data? What are service level agreements you getting from your cloud provider? For more security of your data, ask for SLAs in written and you will also find better cloud service providers also have a detailed, public answer for all of their clients with agreements to back them up.
Read for Privacy policy documentation complete and also take action if support is not given by technicians properly.
Change
Changing the platform may or may not be beneficial for your business. Is cloud-based IT is even worse than on-premises IT or it is just completely different. You with you technician team may feel managing the workloads and systems easily as it is quite similar to their on-premises equivalents along with more flexibility, uptime, and scalability.
Our technology is constantly changing or we can say that change is constant but now we have methods for setting goals, testing, planning, and training. Whenever there is change, risks are there. Cloud migration risks can be managed only with a right approach. You can simply think cloud as an extension of your IT environment but not the alternative. If it makes sense, you can choose to enter the cloud at any pace.
Simply start small and first get comfortable. Rather than putting all your data and applications in the cloud, put piece by piece. Make the larger cloud when you are completely ready for it.