Cloud Migration – Benefits, Risks and How to Avoid Them

Cloud adoption is something which organizations continue to have huge performance gains for over a decade. According to a survey it is estimated that more than 70% of businesses have at least one application in the cloud. Having business in the cloud provides a variety of opportunities to improve processes in businesses and benefit operations.

Cloud migration generally refers to moving systems and data from servers to cloud infrastructure. It also applies to moving business data from cloud to cloud or from one cloud platform to another.

Here is everything you need to know about cloud migration, its benefits, risks, and how you can avoid them.

Benefits of Cloud Migration

Cost Saving

The cost incurred for the cloud is very less as compared to a physical data centre. Operational expenses of cloud migration are very low. The human resource cost is also saved as a dedicated technical team is not required for data centre management.

Flexibility

With cloud migration, organizations can expand its businesses and even withdraw few services from cloud, based on its necessity hybrid cloud solutions such as machine learning, image processing and artificial intelligence, the newest technology trends which allow organizations in effectively expanding its business operations.

Higher Resource Availability

With cloud migration, there will be a substantial rise in resource availability and will help to have a better resource utilization thereby leading a way to enhanced customer satisfaction.

Auto Updates

System updates is a tedious task for technical team and require prolonged analysis. With cloud migration, organizations need not worry about system updates, as most of the cloud migration plans include ready to go software updates. Hence, the system updates are automatically taken care by the cloud providers.

Related Exclusive Article : Is It Time to Join the Cloud?

Enhanced Security

Cloud migration has enabled over 90% of the businesses across the world find enhancement in their security. Cloud providers offer robust security mechanism for the organizations, it offers better control on data access, as it strictly restricts unauthorized user access.

Ensuring Business Continuity

Business continuity is an important factor that contributes to business success. In today’s time, even a few minutes of downtime also cannot be spared. Cloud migration can offer a very quick disaster recovery from any natural disasters or power outages.

Agility

Acquiring storage space is very easy with cloud migration. It can be done in a day or even hours. By adapting cloud migration, the organizations will have greater agility to adapt to newer technology environments.

Quality Control

Cloud platforms enable organizations to store all their documents in one place and in the same format. Cloud platforms also allow consistency in data and eliminate human errors. Updates or revisions made on the documents can be easily tracked.

Operational Efficiency

The ease of using cloud migration services mak teams in companies more productive. The cloud manages to remove region-specific dependencies even when it comes to distributed teams thereby helps in the creation of a collaborative team setting.

Mobility

With cloud platforms, you can access business information and necessary data from anywhere and from any device. Nowadays it has become need for a cloud to access the organization data from the comfort of our home, without compromising on data security.

Continuous Monitoring

Most of the cloud service providers offer monitoring services for organization critical applications and machine which enables organizations to get notified on potential issues as soon as the issue occurs, which in turn enables IT teams to immediately remediate the problem.

Intelligence

Artificial Intelligence is the latest trend in Cloud migration. It allows organizations to gain advanced analytical insight on their data.

Major Risks in Cloud Migration and How You Can Avoid Them

When it comes to risks while adopting cloud migration, there very few risks involved. Let us dive into some of the major risks which companies face while choosing a cloud platform:

Date loss:

One of the most common problems which companies face is data loss during migration. Troublesome cases of missing, corrupt, or incomplete files are common during cloud migration. Hence, it is critical to have a backup in case business owners or other stakeholders require restoring or recovering lost data.

How to avoid

A security violation to a power outage at a data center may lead to data loss. Hence, if you store the backups of databases in the cloud, you can restore all the data fast.

By utilizing multiple cloud providers, you don’t have to be worried regarding the sudden failure of the service of a specific provider. Be sure to configure the backup of migrated data to save time and money. Must backup your old system so you can find every missing files if required.

Complexity Around Security:

The complexity around security is the major cloud migration risk that maximum companies encounter followed by pricing and legacy infrastructure. Transferring data to the cloud brings many security risks, such as accidental errors, external attacks, insider threats, malware, problems on the side of the cloud provider, insecure APIs, contractual violations, compliance breaches, etc.

How to avoid

Cloud service providers that offer security, make sure to protect your physical assets from unauthorized access. They spend much on security for safeguarding client data from cyber threats. 

They provide various solutions to keep your data secure while migrating to the cloud. However, you can hire an experienced security team and some trained engineers who can make the required configurations and give assurance about the long-term data security in the cloud.

Inadequacy of Visibility and Control

Visibility in the public cloud is one of the common risks during cloud migration. It affects network and app functionality. However, when moving to cloud services the responsibility for a few policies shifts to cloud service providers based on the service type. As a result, the company needs visibility into public cloud workloads.

How to avoid

There are few tools that can help you in the app and network performance monitoring. Third-party security vendors and cloud service providers provide many solutions for that. Demands for efficient monitoring tools include strong analytics, automatic response to some kinds of threats and alerts, a steep learning curve, a monitoring solution must integrate simply with other solutions, and scopes for configuring various types of alerts.

However, cloud migration needs some effort and resources, avoiding this process could be a disadvantage for your company in comparison with your competitors. Hire an experienced organization that can help you execute an effective, secure, and successful cloud migration.

Source : Weingenious technocrats Blog