Cloud Data Migration: Avoiding Common Issues & Problems

Cloud computing is becoming a popular concept and has reached an established status of the IT strategies of many organizations. Thanks to its global awareness; as a business all around has taken advantage of the multiple benefits of cloud computing.  The features covering easy implementation, cost-effectiveness, and efficiency in the use of solutions with the liberty of scalability are the salient benefits cloud computing offers. Needless to say, the cloud drives higher productivity at a lower cost.  This is the main reason why companies have adopted computing application in their overall IT program; they have at least one.

Moreover, these companies, to meet their business needs, tend to scale up or down their bandwidth. In modern business, it has become common for companies to switch from one cloud provider to another.  Or even move from a public cloud solution to their own private cloud environments.  Taking the numerous advantages available into account and different types of cloud services offered large and medium organizations are choosing for hybrid cloud environments to draw maximum benefit from both public and private cloud network models.

With the purpose to achieve this, critical business-related applications and data need to be migrated to a fresh environment bringing us to cloud data migration thereby improving security and raising the productivity.  However, reaching this stage is not easy.

We have put down some of the top cloud data migration challenges that companies may come across and how to overcome them without hampering your cloud journey.

Cloud Data Migration – Plans & Strategy

For an organization, switching to the cloud can be related to many reasons. The key factors that determine the switchover for companies to choose cloud data migrations are; performance, costs, scalability flexibility, easy maintenance, and digital transformation. But an organization’s business strategy must certainly define the cloud strategy to be adapted and not the other way around.

It is essential that before migrating to a cloud environment, organizations must thoroughly plan in place and only finalize the strategy. Many a time, companies fail to notice this and end up with losses during or after the cloud migration process. It is also essential that organizations must ensure that all the personnel involved in the migration must be on board and the processes needed for such a move must be planned and adapted for your company. In other words, everybody must get involved and must be in the know about the process. All these aspects have to be painstakingly deliberated before the cloud data migration is incorporated.

Downtime & Idle Time

Switching to Data Migration from one cloud to another has its own challenges if not arranged with a proper backup. If an organization has plans to migrate, all the applications and services residing in them will be severely affected if precautions are not taken. Even network or service outages can be disastrous and slight downtime can result in huge losses to the business in terms of revenue, reputation and customer loyalty. Downtime is one of the most decisive and common issues occurring during cloud migration. Ideally, a solution to this is to set up a backup environment or assign temporary resources to run the applications until the migration process is complete.

But, to set up a temporary environment and to host all your business applications and services is not as stress-free as it appears to be. The allocated resources must have the capacity to house these applications and must also be able to handle the user’s load on the servers to prevent any data loss. Anyway, downtime is inevitable, but one can try to minimize it. Ideally, beforehand, some organizations start posting a banner on the applications to inform users that the service or application will be unavailable. This step is taken to plan the migration when the use of the service is minimally used.

Data protection and security

In this contemporary IT world, internet security is the biggest issue that merits attention; a worrying sign of anxiety. Cyber-attacks are growing rapidly and data breaches are also increasing at an alarming rate. Quite often the process of migration gets hindered by these cyber-attacks. Therefore, it is advisable to take extreme caution during the process. Your organization’s data gets extremely vulnerable when data is being moved from a physical server to a cloud or from one cloud to another. Here neither your network security nor the cloud’s security would be capable to protect your data from any breaches during the migration so the process of migration has to be done under the supervision of experts. In other words, all possible security measures have to be implemented to ensure there is no data leakage or breach.

When migrating to a cloud, organizations must also obtain third-party reports about the cloud provider’s security. Generally, these reports often help in planning a proper security measure to consider during and after the migration process. The common myth in cloud migration is that companies often assume that the cloud provider will take care of all the security-related aspects. This should be quashed.

Interoperability

This refers to the ability of systems to communicate with each other and is one of the demanding issues in cloud migration as it is a challenge to establish proper communication between your applications with newer cloud environments. However, when working with a cloud framework, a company has to safeguard that all applications and services depending on the cloud work well with that particular cloud provider’s systems. Sporadically, you may have to adapt some of your company’s processes to that of the cloud provider to achieve success.

Adaptability

Adaptability or compliance is the most common issue faced during cloud migration. It is a common practical challenge every individual or organization has to face while switching to a new system or policy, per se.

But particularly in cloud migration, organizations have to spend considerable capital equipping them with sufficient knowledge required to handle the new cloud platform. At times, with the migration to the cloud, companies might have to modify or even revamp their operation, resources, staff, authority and the funding in various departments to get the task in sync with the new cloud environment.

Generally, problems also arise when an organization plans to modify its current working style to adjust with the cloud services. At the same time, it would be an imprudent thing to do if this architectural change breaks the system. At the end of the day, every business must consider the return on investments.

Barring these common yet grave cloud data migration issues, there are several other important factors that can make or break the business for organizations planning to move to the cloud. Cost, time and changes in management and staff are among the other crucial aspects that cannot be neglected. Ideally, the effective way to offset these challenges is to have a qualified team of cloud professionals’ guidance and get the migration done for you. Even after your business has successfully migrated into cloud services, you are not done. To avert any future problems, you have to constantly learn, take precaution and keep monitoring to triumph.