10 Mistakes to Avoid Make When Migrating to the Cloud

by Chris Preimesberger

Faster doesn’t always mean better. Urgency in moving to the cloud often leads customers to take an all-or-nothing approach. Users have to consider everything from cost to regulatory issues and cultural impact to access implications. Rushing through this process can cause issues right from the start.

Customers can miscalculate an operating expense as cheaper than a capital expense just because they are writing smaller checks. This isn’t always the case because they are typically just writing a lot more of those smaller checks. Cloud systems, over time, are more expensive. What cloud buys is flexibility, not savings.

Users often confuse flexibility with absolute freedom, and it often costs them. Controls have to be in place for issues ranging from optimizing consumption to access to regulatory compliance.

Some clouds are better suited for enterprise workloads; others for development and testing. Some workloads are better off on private clouds and others on physical servers. IT administrators investigating cloud options need to start with an understanding of what is right for the workload.

All workloads must either be in the public cloud or on premises. While it is a good practice to co-locate computing with active data, a public cloud can be introduced for backup, disaster recovery and creating tiers of cold data for long-term retention. Hybrid clouds are a viable and low-risk option to introduce cloud into the data center.

Private and public clouds have different deployment modes, so there will be sufficient differences in their management tools and interfaces. However, IT organizations need to have consistency in their management philosophies, and tools need to converge at least at the policy level.

All cloud vendors have to have good connectivity into their data centers, but what users have to consider is this: If they are going to run workloads in the cloud, do they have enough connectivity with the cloud provider? This includes bandwidth from their facilities to the geographic location of the provider. Bandwidth costs break a cloud deal more often than customers realize.

Security of the cloud vendor’s data centers and infrastructure is a top priority. Some of them have impressive K-9 security and other layers. But security and access of your business’s applications and data is your problem. The iCloud break-in exposed a lot of those realities.

Cloud vendors are only responsible for uptime, and most contracts will not even guarantee that. You have to pay to have your data replicated, and that only gives you data availability. An IT administrator is responsible for the business’s disaster-recovery strategy and its own recovery from corruptions or breaches.

Each public cloud is managed and operated differently, and that is quite different from how private clouds or hosted-service clouds may run. Portability and migration capabilities are still in their infancy. Tread with care before you place all your data center eggs in a single cloud basket.