Cloud migration is challenging, cumbersome, and risky for traditional organizations relying on in-house custom-built systems to support achieving revenue from years on years. Today I will be discussing a wide variety of challenges organizations are facing while planning for cloud migration. These typical challenges are talks of every board room and the agenda of the meetings. However, there is no doubt that workloads migration to the cloud is helping organizations to reduce operating costs and build integrated, automated IT infrastructure.

Some Facts on Public Cloud:

• The global public cloud computing market is continuing to grow, and according to the Statista report of August 4, 2021, it will $482 billion in 2022.
• IDG’s 2020 Cloud Computing study reveals that 92% of the organizations are somewhat in the cloud.
• According to the worldwide enterprise cloud strategy 2017-2020 report by Statista, 82% of the respondent reported that they had deployed hybrid cloud strategy in their organizations.
• Gartner’s global forecast for public cloud end-user spending will grow 23.1% in 2021 to reach $332.3 billion, compares to $270 billion in 2020. (read diagram/table for podcast)
• Canalys report for the year 2020 that “total cloud infrastructure services spending grew 33% to US$142 billion, up from US$107 billion in 2019.”
• IDC’s report on global public cloud services $312 Billion in 2020
• Cloud computing market report published by marketsandmarkets “The global cloud computing market size is expected to grow from USD 371.4 billion in 2020 to USD 832.1 billion by 2025”
• Share of corporate data stored in the cloud in organizations worldwide from 2015 to 2021 “As of 2021, around 50 percent of all corporate data is stored in the cloud. This share reached 30 percent in 2015 and has continued to grow as companies increasingly shift their resources into cloud environments in the hope of improving security and reliability next to advancing business agility.“

How to Secure and optimize your cloud migration

You have a daunting task in hand to migrate to the cloud and do it securely and efficiently. If it is not fully optimized and performed correctly, your dream of digital transformation in an organization can hit roadblocks/pitfalls.

Now I will share some of the common challenges which I see the cloud migrations; these are based on observation, reading a wide array of articles, and discussion with fellow IT friends/colleagues in the extended & broader community of IT professionals. What I will be doing is to mention all the typical challenges, and then I will also try to share the perspective of how you can overcome or what could be the strategy to address them. These could be starting from which workloads to be moved to what should be the order of migration to how we will have reliability and performance of business-critical services on the cloud. How I will implement required levels of security controls and regulatory compliance to who is my cloud vendor and this cloud migration must not disrupt my existing IT services, so on…

Gartner, in an article published, has beautifully categorized into six ways of cloud migrations challenge

You’ll Learn: Common Cloud Migration Challenges and How to Overcome Them:

• Why cloud migration is challenging?
• Some facts on public cloud adoption
• Common Challenges:
  • Do you have a well-defined & documented Cloud Migration Strategy?
  • How do you see your requirements for Data Security and Compliance?
  • Do you have clarity on the Cost of the Cloud Migration Process?
  • How is your organization's response to adoption/change?
  • Migrating to cloud – is it Vendor Lock-In? and Who is the best Cloud Service Provider for me?
  • Have you done a proper evaluation of the current IT portfolio (workload migration assessment)
  • How to ensure minimum business downtime/minimum business disruption

Resources:

• Cloud Computing Trends: 2021 State of the Cloud Report
• Statista report of August 4, 2021, it will $482 billion in 2022.
• IDG’s 2020 Cloud Computing study
• worldwide enterprise cloud strategy 2017-2020 report by Statista
• Gartner’s global forecast for public cloud end-user spending
• Canalys report for the year 2020
• IDC’s report on global public cloud services
• Cloud computing market report published by marketsandmarkets
• Share of corporate data stored in the cloud in organizations worldwide from 2015 to 2021 
• 95- Cloud Security with CIS Benchmarks
• 94- How to develop a cloud migration strategy?
• 93- Cloud Migration Workload Assessment
• 91- Workload Migration to Cloud – Getting Started