The Biggest Challenges Facing Cloud Migration in 2020

Cloud computing technology is becoming more and more popular, but companies that want to stand out from the competition must overcome the challenges of cloud migration this year.



Research shows that 2020 will be a year in which cloud migration and adoption and cloud computing expenditures will rapidly increase by 17%.



As more and more companies join the cloud computing trend, many people will find that the cloud computing journey is not always smooth sailing. The same challenges appear time and time again, often preventing companies from getting real benefits from the cloud.




What kind of cloud computing provider to choose?



When companies begin their journey to cloud migration, they usually get support to use a cloud center of excellence for development or to build an entire product in a public cloud provider. However, many companies will face difficult choices: which basket should they put their eggs in? That is, what cloud computing provider should they choose?



So, which method should the enterprise adopt? Maybe the enterprise already has a team of engineers trained by a specific cloud computing provider. Perhaps the company has a product that needs to be developed that can better use the services provided by a cloud computing provider. Or, the business operations of the enterprise and the region where the customer is located are better aligned with the regional availability of a cloud computing provider.



In all cases, choosing an initial provider to prove that the organization's maturity has been adopted on a large scale is critical. This brings enterprises to the next challenge: try to adopt more cloud platforms.




Cloudy-the temptation to try too early



This seems to be a challenge that companies have encountered many times. Most organizations try to do too much work too early in the early stages of their journey to adopt cloud computing. These companies can quickly adopt multi-cloud to avoid vendor lock-in. However, adopting a multi-cloud strategy from day one usually results in low engineering standards and insufficient organizational maturity to support adoption.



The multi-cloud approach undoubtedly has many advantages, especially in a regulated environment. However, companies should make this decision based on their engineering standards and organizational maturity and experience, rather than worrying about supplier lock-in based on market drivers. Many companies often fail to understand the attitude of regulators towards adopting cloud computing technology, but make decisions based on emotional factors rather than actual regulatory issues.



The best approach is to first adopt the services of a cloud computing provider to build technical capabilities and demonstrate the ability to host production-level workloads based on the surrounding enterprise and regulatory framework. Once an enterprise has the proper personnel and process aspects and has been proven to some extent, deploying in other cloud platforms only becomes a question of scale and technical capabilities rather than organizational capabilities.



In addition, due to increased regulatory pressures or the need for professional cloud platforms in some use cases, many companies will start to increase their multi-cloud work significantly in 2020, so they need to operate well on one cloud platform before expanding to another cloud platform , And the experience and lessons learned from it become crucial.



The ultimate goal is to make the second cloud platform as good as the first. In this way, enterprises can achieve cloud neutrality in the long term, but they must reduce risks in a gradual manner and minimize costs.




Cloud agent-multi-cloud manager



It may seem strange to include cloud agents on the list of challenges and obstacles to large-scale adoption of cloud computing, but it still manages to lurk. The next step that companies often consider to be critical (once they have forced the engineering team into a strict multi-cloud framework) is to consider multi-cloud management agents. They provide another abstract framework and an inefficient API to set goals to provide a "service catalog".



The history of cloud agents shows that this often ends with expensive bills for cloud agents or complex engineering grids that hinder scalability, and often leads to frustration in engineering teams.



Providing engineering teams with a loosely coupled framework that allows them to explore and utilize the best resources that cloud computing providers must provide has proven to be the only method that can be extended. This can then be supplemented with some domain-specific tools that can achieve a more effective governance model without hindering engineering creativity.



For example, the financial technology team of a company seeks to effectively manage, review, and optimize its financial situation around cloud computing consumption, and uses multi-cloud cost management tools such as Cloudability.



In short, for an enterprise to successfully expand its cloud adoption rate in 2020, they must accept the best service that each cloud computing provider can provide. However, this does not mean that new cloud platforms are adopted too quickly because of concerns about vendor lock-in, and the best cloud computing strategy may now be to use a single cloud platform. Finally, companies must provide a loosely coupled framework for their engineering teams to adopt these frameworks while leaving more room for engineering creativity.