Congratulations on the cloud migration for your business. However, here are the top 5 post-migration issues you should be equipped to handle in the business.
1. Organizational And Operational Change Management
The biggest challenge is not usually technology. Rather, it’s the processes and people that must adapt to the new technology. People in different departments should be part of the migration from the start but the degree and type of activity will be different.
Just like any other shift in information technology, there should be a change in management which is important to make the cloud migration successful. Focusing only on the technology part of the activity will lead to poor results. Running applications in the cloud will change the roles and responsibilities for different people in varying teams.
These include compliance, legal and human resource. It’s also creates new vacancies in the organization such as security professionals, DevOps engineers and cloud architects. Therefore, the management should provide ongoing training, education and communication to everyone in the company. This way, all the employees are capable, fully enabled and comfortable handling their jobs like a regular day.
2. Underutilization And Unbudgeted Costs
After cloud migration, every company should take the right steps to make sure they enjoy the benefits of the cloud-based solutions and developments. The cloud is agile and flexible thereby a huge benefit for different organizations. However, it should be managed and controlled to avoid issues such as compliance, increased risk, unbudgeted cost and underutilization. These problems can be avoided by doing the following.
• Identify benchmarks and define targets in the key areas such as availability, performance, RPO/RTO, cost and compliance.
• Establish governance and continuous monitoring/measurements with regular management review and oversight. It’s prudent to maintain the historical operational data.
• There should be proactive and ongoing optimization of the cloud environment on all processes such as cost. Some of the useful processes include provisioning and proactive planning to leverage the flexibility of the cloud through autoscaling, scheduled environment and application health checks, using cold storage or buying reserved instances to reduce the cost when the trend or threshold indicate, leveraging DevOps and automation to monitor actions and environments such as shutting down the unused instances and division-wide or organizational consolidation of billing and analysis.
• Understanding how to reduce cost and resources by outsourcing to specialized managed service providers (for the infrastructure and application).
3. Testing
Testing is an integral process in the cloud migration journey. It can prevent any unexpected gaps in your business processes, database errors, server breakdowns and future scalability issues. It also ensures that applications run well in the new cloud environment.
Testing should be handled in various ways throughout the migration and post-migration process. These include integration testing, security testing and performance testing. It should be ongoing since applications should be updated and modified. Organizations should also have regular health checks. They should ensure that the infrastructure and applications are operating as they are expected. Also, the health checks should confirm if there are any opportunities to optimize. Employing an expert in this field is advisable, Pendulum – IT who provide AWS migration services in London are experienced in testing and ensuring that your migration is as smooth as possible.
4. Security
There are legitimate security concerns since data breaches occur frequently. There is a risk associated with the responsibility of guarding and protecting the data as well as concerns about cloud security. It’s always nerve-wracking to hand off control of proprietary and sensitive data to a third party. To prevent any security concerns after migration, the cloud provider should ensure user identity management, offer secure authentication and proper access control.
If they are operating in a hybrid cloud environment, the IT team should also focus on the physical security of the database and the whole environment. Secure data storage practices are important since most data breaches happens because of human failure whether unintentional or intentional. They might also be caused by a failure in identity and access control, data storage security or data management. Companies that use a public cloud provider should know that cloud security standards have improved in the last 5 years.
Security in the public cloud should be a partnership between the provider and the user. Therefore, it’s important to understand the ownership areas to guarantee overall security. A public cloud such as AWS, offers a shared responsibility model. In this instance, the provider is in charge of securing the cloud itself such as the software, hardware and the physical infrastructure.
The customer is responsible for system security issues such as data, applications, platform, network traffic protection and operating system. All customers should find the best way to take care of the post-migration issues using tools, procedures or managed service providers with experience and skills relating to handling the cloud.
5. Downtime
Downtime will not be a huge issue if there is proper security and monitoring practices in use. However, it’s a real challenge to confront and might be costly. Note that, the average cost of IT downtime is about $5.6K per every minute. There should be proper strategies in place to avoid downtime. These include multi-cloud or multi-location environment with backup, disaster recovery and availability strategies. It’s the best way to guarantee resiliency and reduce the risk of downtime.
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