This article discusses how to avoid pitfalls and reap rewards during cloud migration

Reposted from: Andy Patrizio (InfoWorld | November 18, 2019)

For most companies, migrating to the cloud is no longer a question of "if" but "when." By migrating applications to the cloud, you can improve security, data access, scalability, and IT flexibility, but that's just the beginning. Moving to the cloud can also help you save money.

However, be warned: not all cloud migrations go smoothly. Migrations often take longer than expected, and some fail completely, resulting in wasted time and expense. Some applications, after being moved to the cloud, may even perform worse than they did on-premises. The result may simply be another migration—back to the on-premises data center.

A recent study sponsored by security vendor Fortinet and conducted by supply chain expert IHS Markit found that many companies (74% of respondents) have brought cloud-based applications back in-house after failing to achieve expected benefits.

This is not a new problem. Googling cloud migration failures yields cases going back several years. This issue has been discussed for quite some time. At its root, migration failure is not a technical failure but often a leadership failure.

Here are the 5 main factors that lead to cloud migration failure, and how to succeed.

Cloud Migration Failure #1: Lacking a Good Partner

The first step is realizing you can't do this alone, especially at the beginning. You need a partner, whether it's a global professional services firm like Accenture or a local consulting company. This is a question that needs careful consideration, including taking into account some external factors. Ideally, you can find a network consultant in your industry and region to help select the right partner.

Choose your partner carefully. You need a highly valuable partner, one that has not only technical capabilities but also change management capabilities," says Joshua Greenbaum, president of enterprise applications consulting.

A good cloud migration expert can help you identify the best applications to migrate, determine how to integrate legacy systems with cloud services, and plan and execute the migration. A good partner can also help you develop an effective hybrid or multi-cloud strategy.

Cloud Migration Failure #2: Cloud Maladaptation

One of the most common mistakes companies make is running their applications in the cloud the same way they ran them on-premises. Tim Crawford, president of CIO consulting firm Avoa, says this is a huge and common mistake.

"On-premises applications are used to consuming resources at peak levels," Crawford says. "The cloud is designed to use resources when you need them and give them back when you don't. But traditional applications don't take full advantage of the cloud's autonomy and orchestration capabilities."

Too many customers forget that every byte they run on a public cloud is metered, and they'll have to pay for it. They let unmodified applications run at full speed, burning through compute cycles, and then the bill comes a month later. Simply lifting and shifting an application to the cloud can easily cause bill shock. In the worst case, you're facing a retreat back to the on-premises data center.

Cloud Migration Failure #3: Insufficient Internal Skills

If you think you can manage your public cloud or even hybrid cloud using old techniques and methods like ITIL frameworks, waterfall processes, monolithic applications, and operational silos, you're in for a surprise.

You need people with skills to manage dynamic infrastructure, containers, automation, microservices, and more. The problem is, everyone else needs them too! New technologies will help with operations, but attracting, training, and retaining top talent remains critical.

"The cloud operating model shifts traditional, static, monolithic software management (using separate on-premises legacy tools and suites) to a highly distributed, dynamic, atomized, and abstracted service environment, often managed by cloud-based multi-point solutions," says Andi Mann, chief technology advocate at analytics company Splunk. "It requires new skills to manage the cloud platform itself as well as containers, microservices, APIs, SaaS systems, and more."

Cloud Migration Failure #4: Not Bringing in Stakeholders

Good governance of a cloud migration project will involve every stakeholder in the business being moved to the cloud. However, typically, projects are driven by IT, who then inform those affected after the project is complete.

"This situation is more common than anyone admits," Greenbaum says. "There's a lot of basic project management here, checking if the right people are on the steering committee and getting the right information. They're often not invited, and by the time they're notified, it's too late."

A recent example Greenbaum encountered was a company making significant changes to customer experience during migration to the cloud. Unfortunately, they didn't consider the impact on the supply chain. As a result, the supply chain team wasn't involved in the sales transformation. After the migration was complete, supply chain team members realized what had happened and found they couldn't meet the new demands created by the transformation.

Cloud Migration Failure #5: Unrealistic Expectations

Migrating to the cloud can bring tremendous benefits—speed, flexibility, cost reduction, strategic focus, scalability, reach, and more—but it also carries certain risks. To get the most out of your cloud deployment, start by avoiding the hype and having realistic expectations about what you can achieve and potential new risks.

Leadership especially hopes to save money through cloud computing, but this isn't always the case, especially if you haven't re-architected your applications, making it easy to encounter the problem mentioned in failure factor #2. Additionally, cloud adopters often expect to do a lot less work in the neighborhood, but cloud infrastructure only replaces servers, not your IT staff.

Don't think you can migrate to a cloud environment and get rid of all DBAs, security operators, help desk engineers, and other software specialists. If you run a hybrid cloud like the vast majority of enterprises, you still need hardware support engineers to support the physical assets you hold.

Cloud Migration Success Factor #1: Lead a Qualified Team, and Require Your Partner to Do the Same

Demand for cloud services exceeds supply, and there's a shortage of highly qualified talent to get the work done. Greenbaum says he's seen many projects founder due to understaffing.

"Projects succeed because customers bring their teams to the grid and require their systems integrators to bring their teams to the grid too," Greenbaum says. "If you don't put your best people on it, you risk getting a poorer result."

Cloud Migration Success Factor #2: Be Picky About What Goes on the Cloud

A common mistake companies still make is moving everything to the cloud, but not everything belongs there. Crawford says to put the most standard commercial applications in the cloud and keep unique code on-premises.

"If it doesn't make a difference to your business, consider moving it, like email and calendars, ERP and HCM," Crawford advises. "Core back-office functions are critical, but is this where your IP differentiates from competitors? No. These are good opportunities to move to the cloud," he says.

Cloud Migration Success Step #3: Innovation and Differentiation

Since you should re-architect applications for the cloud, treat it as an opportunity to embrace new methods and designs. Re-architect as many on-premises applications as possible for cloud-native design, where applications are elastic and can scale as needed. "Containerize" your applications to run on Docker, managed by Kubernetes. All major cloud providers offer services to help Kubernetes implement services both on-premises and in the cloud.

"The most successful organizations I know have used the nature of the cloud to innovate, not just copy—providing new prototypes they never had before, elevating services to levels customers never expected, and developing new applications in new ways for new markets," Mann says.

Cloud Migration Success Step #4: A Cohesive Strategy

Approaching the cloud strategically means reconsidering budget, organization, processes, skills, security, data integration, and more. Technology is just a small part; this requires a cohesive strategy. A successful migration involves making conscious portfolio decisions, including what to keep in the on-premises data center, what to move, which platforms to stick with or abandon, and how to refactor applications to take advantage of the cloud. By standardizing on common compute, storage, and database platforms, you can reduce complexity and the costs of management and operation.

Keeping things simple also means avoiding overly complex migrations and taking on more than you can handle. When a project's scope is too large or the timeframe or budget too small, failure is easy. Don't try to do everything at once. Break the project into phases and tackle one at a time. Adopt an iterative, DevOps-like approach. Complete one part, make sure it works, then move to the next part of the project.

Cloud Migration Success Step #5: Consider a Brand New Data Model

Migration to the cloud means the emergence of a completely new data model. Putting data in the cloud is an opportunity to extend the data model to a broader model. For example, moving to a more customer-centric model might mean bringing in more data from many different sources.

Old on-premises data center data might have a simple customer input, like name and address, but new cloud data might come from social media, IoT devices, and other sources. Or you might even migrate to a completely different data analytics platform. Amazon Redshift is PostgreSQL-compatible, but Google's BigQuery uses types different from typical SQL or PostgreSQL. Snowflake supports semi-structured data in various formats.

"Theoretically, you're changing business practices, so the data you need is different," Greenbaum says. "Data quality changes are a political decision like anything else. This isn't just a simple question of let's put data in the cloud, but a real change management issue."