Today, enterprises migrating their businesses to cloud platforms can not only improve efficiency, scalability, and business agility, but also simplify management and reduce overall costs. Although there are many advantages, enterprises also face real challenges after
cloud migration. Changing the infrastructure of business-critical applications is not a rash decision. Once the
migration is implemented, it must be carefully planned and executed according to best practices. But in many cases, companies often do not consider some factors after migrating to the cloud platform, so they should consider them in advance and include them in the overall migration plan.
5 challenges that must be addressed after migrating to the cloud
Organizational and operational change management
Under normal circumstances, the biggest challenge an enterprise faces is not technology, but that people and processes must adapt to cloud computing technology. Consistent with other changes in information technology, change management is critical to a successful migration to the cloud platform, and focusing only on technology will lead to poor results.
Running applications in the cloud changes the roles and responsibilities of different team members (including compliance, human resources, and laws), and creates a demand for new positions such as cloud computing architects, DevOps engineers, and cloud computing security professionals . Therefore, corporate managers must provide appropriate messaging, education, and continuous training within them to ensure that all employees can give full play to their abilities in their daily work and work more easily.
Underutilized and unbudgeted costs
After migrating the business to the cloud platform, companies must take appropriate steps to ensure that cloud computing-based deployments and solutions are fully utilized. The flexibility and agility of cloud computing can bring huge benefits, but it must be controlled and managed to avoid problems such as insufficient utilization, unbudgeted costs, increased risk, and compliance.
To prevent these problems, its basic activities include: defining goals and determining benchmarks in key areas, such as performance, cost, availability, recovery time objective (RTO)/recovery point objective (RPO), and compliance; through continuous measurement and Monitoring and regular supervision and management reviews to establish governance; continuous and active optimization of the cloud computing environment across all levels, including costs, such as proactive planning and configuration, to automatically expand, adopt applications, check environmental health, Purchase reserved instances or use cold storage when the threshold indicates to reduce costs, etc.
test
Testing is a crucial step in the cloud migration process. It helps avoid accidents in business processes, future scalability issues, server failures, and database errors. The most important thing is that it can ensure that applications run seamlessly in the new cloud computing environment.
During the migration process and the entire process after the migration of the cloud platform, testing should take multiple forms, including security testing, integration testing, and performance testing, which must be continued. Companies should also implement regular health checks, that is, are applications and infrastructure operating as expected? Is there a chance to optimize and so on.
safety
Due to the alarming rate of data breaches and the risks associated with continued responsibility to protect data, concerns about cloud computing security are reasonable. In order to alleviate the security issues after migration, it is necessary to ensure that the cloud computing provider provides secure identity verification, user identity management and access control. If running in a hybrid cloud environment, the IT team must also pay attention to the physical security of the entire environment and database.
Security measures must be taken for data storage, because most data breaches are caused by human error (whether intentional or unintentional) or fundamentally due to failures in access and identity control, data management, and data storage security.
Downtime
With proper security and monitoring practices, downtime is unlikely to be a problem, but it is still a real challenge that companies must face, and once they encounter downtime, they will have to pay a heavy price. To avoid business interruption, consider adopting a multi-site or multi-cloud environment with appropriate disaster recovery, backup, and availability strategies. Distributing workloads in multiple locations can increase resilience and significantly reduce the risk of downtime.
Migrating business from the original infrastructure to the cloud platform is a daunting task for any enterprise. However, if companies are aware of the challenges they may face after migrating to cloud platforms in advance, they will take necessary measures to prevent them as soon as possible. Cloud migration is a systematic project. Enterprises need to have professional cloud migration services to help them perform cloud migration in an orderly, safe, and convenient manner, thereby ensuring business availability, security, and continuity.
