Pitfalls to avoid in a cloud journey

Cloud Computing today provides easy access to an unprecedented amount of data and processing capacity. This enables us to solve problems in a whole new way. Organizations are looking at Cloud to bring innovation and provide new customer experiences. An Organization can take multiple paths in their journey to the cloud. These paths are summarized by what is popularly known as the 6 R’s - Retain, Rehost, Replatform, Refactor/ReArchitect, Repurchase and Retire. Whatever path an organization takes, there are certain pitfalls that they should avoid to make their cloud journey less bumpy and deal with unexpected surprises. In this article I have shared some of my experiences and learnings helping few of my clients on their cloud journey to avoid some of these common pitfalls. 

Pitfall #1 : Starting a cloud journey without a strategy and executive sponsorship

One of my banking clients started its cloud journey by purchasing a subscription for AWS, without a well defined strategy on what workload to move and how to move. They initially thought of moving to AWS with an aim to optimize and save on their data center and infrastructure cost. But that was only a very narrow view of getting started on Cloud journey. With that approach they could not see real benefits of moving to the cloud as they were not able to get rid of their DCs completely and were also paying for monthly usage of AWS services, which added to the overall cost. So they looked at the organizational business objectives and started exploring other cloud capabilities that can be leveraged for transforming their IT and business services and finally came up with a cloud strategy that aligned to the overall business vision.  

Hence it is advisable to start your journey to cloud with a well defined cloud adoption strategy that is aligned to your business outcomes. This will ensure that the journey to cloud is not just an IT initiative but has the backing of business- be it to optimize IT and Infrastructure cost or to provide innovative & improved customer experiences by leveraging maximum cloud capabilities

Pitfall #2 : Not planning adequately for the cloud journey

One of the biggest challenges with a journey to the cloud is not knowing where to start from. What should be the first application to move to cloud? Which applications should move first to get the max ROI of cloud investments - internal applications external business critical applications? For one of my insurance clients, we broke down the cloud migration journey into phases after conducting a discovery of your on-prem applications. The discovery phase helped to find out and prioritize applications that can be easily moved to the cloud with minimal impact to business. It also gave a good understanding of the intricacies involved in cloud migration. 

It is advisable to start with migrating simple and non-critical, possibly internal applications and data to the cloud first. This will give you a better understanding of the nuances involved in migrating to cloud and build confidence. Then plan to migrate business critical and sensitive data to the cloud. If the data to be moved is sensitive, there may be regulatory penalties in case of non-compliances. Hence consider the location where this data will reside and how it should be secured, while migrating sensitive data and applications to the cloud.

Pitfall #3 : Trying to migrate everything together

A banking client wanted to move their loan application to cloud. This application had multiple systems and databases interacting with each other. Migrating all of these systems together would have been the sweetest dream. However, there were complexities involved in migrating the applications and the associated data. Hence, taking an agile and iterative approach to migrate different parts of the application was deemed as the safest approach rather than trying to migrate everything together.

An iterative and agile approach to cloud migrations allows the teams to experiment, learn and move applications to cloud without risking business critical applications. Before migrating business critical applications, ensure that proper monitoring and security solutions are in place for the application on the cloud to be able go troubleshoot issues and protect against any malicious attacks. Monitoring cloud enabled business processes to get an unified and end-to-end visibility of business processes deployed across public, private and on-premise infrastructure is essential for providing optimal user experience.

Pitfall #4: Underestimating complexities of Cloud Integration

The banking client, when migrating their loans applications, had several systems to be integrated. The complexities of application dependencies and cloud integration was underestimated. It was not just moving VMs to cloud as applications could not run the same way on cloud as on-prem. There were local file system dependencies, legacy as well as external applications that had to be integrated. These needed changes both in the design and the code for integrations to work. Hence moving the complete loan application along with its dependencies was a challenge.

When only a tier of the application may move to cloud but its dependent backend systems have to stay on-prem, enterprises will have to make investments and necessary code changes in the application to build new integrations for the application to run. These kinds of integration complexities are often overlooked and may come in the way of successful cloud migration.

Pitfall #5 : Not addressing cloud security adequately with shared security model

While moving applications to the cloud, enterprises often focus on external threats. However internal threats pose more significant risks. A Gartner report predicts that major cloud security breaches would happen due to misconfiguration, mismanaged credentials and insider threats. Cloud security is a joint responsibility of the organization along with the cloud provider. Hence organizations must understand in detail their responsibilities in the shared responsibility model and never underestimate the efforts to secure and protect data. Securing customer data, applications and operating systems is the prime responsibility of the organization and not the cloud provider. 

Sensitive data being transferred to the cloud must be protected with the right access control and security mechanisms to prevent data breaches. While moving data to cloud, special care must be taken while dealing with sensitive and regulated data like PII information governed by GDPR, payment information covered by PCI DSS and data governed by other industry regulations like HIPAA. 

Enterprises must put in proper governance processes to classify the data and review the permissions and policies for data security on a regular basis. Automation tools can be used to enforce and monitor security policies. Enterprise security policies must evolve as traditional perimeter based security controls are not adequate for native cloud, multi-cloud or hybrid cloud setup. Security policies must be re-designed to meet the latest requirements and make the solution fit the needs of modern integration and cloud environments. 

Pitfall # 6 : Underestimating Costs

Cost savings is what all cloud providers tout for and has also been the biggest attraction for cloud migration. It is true that moving to the cloud helps enterprises save a lot on data center cost, capex for procuring large infrastructure and regular maintenance activities. However, there may be other costs with cloud usage, which if unmanaged can overshoot your estimates. Over provisioned services, unused licenses, duplicated cloud servers - all of these can drive up the cost. Having a centralized strategy to track the expenditure on cloud is therefore essential to be able to forecast and monitor cloud spending to keep it under control. Centralized dashboards, alerts, and processes for visibility and transparency on cloud resource usage are required to manage the cloud expenditure for organizations with multiple projects, teams, or business units.