A wealth of benefits can be gained from migrating to the cloud, but organisations remain hesitant to make the leap as they face significant challenges while planning their cloud journeys. We explore the barriers that our customers often come across throughout their cloud migration plans and share insights as to how you can ease your path to the cloud. 

 Where do we begin with Cloud Migration?

As you start your cloud journey, you may face a lot of questions such as: Which cloud provider should we work with? Do we lift and shift or re-factor applications? How much cloud storage will I need for all my data? Do I or my team know enough about cloud to tackle it ourselves? How secure is the cloud?  

With those questions, comes inevitably, more questions and more research, delaying your cloud migration plans. Your organisation is not alone – although 84% of IT decision makers say that their business have a clear vision for transformation, only 42% have a plan in place, with a further 11% no idea where to start.  

Brightsolid have worked on cloud migration projects with over 150 organisations in the UK and we recommend before jumping into the cloud, you should:  

• Take the time to fully analyse your organisation’s cloud readiness, your current infrastructure including your applications and data, your internal resources and capabilities, the financial implications of moving to cloud, and your goals and aspirations, now and in the future. This helps you prioritise and ensure that cloud plans align with your requirements and capabilities.  
• Create a roadmap that all decision makers can buy into while ensuring that alignment and control is in place so that everyone can succeed and reach their goals. The cloud has expanded technology decisions beyond the IT team and a broader set of internal stakeholders may see the value in cloud.  

Once you have assessed your infrastructure, resources, and goals and motivations, a cloud migration plan can be built that addresses your requirements, with your infrastructure in mind. This can provide guidance and help prioritise tasks and actions as you start to migrate to the cloud. 

Lack of stakeholder buy-in and engagement. 

Many key stakeholders may not fully understand the value of cloud so the first step is to identify each stakeholder’s motivations and objectives to gather insight into the drivers that will get their buy-in for cloud. At the same time, it’s important to address any concerns they may have and highlight the potential risks so everyone is fully informed of potential challenges that may affect their areas of expertise. Sharing these insights will help ease concerns around cloud as well as get buy-in as your cloud migration project progresses.  

The investment into your current infrastructure. 

Significant investment into your existing IT environment can often be a barrier to cloud. I Infrastructure, including your servers, applications, data, and the teams who manage it, are integral to the way your organisation operates, so any proposed changes require careful consideration before moving forward.  

Moreover, many applications and systems have been purpose-built and adhere to industry standards and best practice, resulting in a greater challenge as organisations consider what to do about their monolithic systems – whether to ‘lift and shift’ or completely replace them. However, lifting and shifting applications may not be the easiest route as according to Gartner, 85% of existing core IT applications (ERP, legacy mainframe etc) were not designed with ‘cloud’ in mind and are often highly customised and large systems, which can make them incompatible with cloud platforms, presenting another challenge. 

Leadership teams should consider the financial and operational impact of migrating legacy infrastructure to the cloud and highlight these implications as part of their cloud roadmap. Carefully examine each application and system and ascertain its ‘role’ in your processes and decide which migration strategy to take to ensure you get the most value out of your cloud infrastructure – either lift or shift or a complete replacement to a cloud-based solution. As a result of this evaluation, your organisation may consider a hybrid cloud approach, giving you the best of both worlds.  

The expertise to manage cloud projects. 

Cloud projects are hugely technical and complex, and it is important to have the right skills and competencies before starting any cloud migration projects.  

Gartner discovered that IT executives see the talent shortage as the largest barrier to deploying emerging technologies as although significant budgets have been assigned to cloud projects, there is a scarcity in IT skills and experience that make it difficult to move forward with cloud migration.   

To ensure that your cloud projects move forward, consider working with Managed Service Providers (MSPs) like Brightsolid who have the knowledge and experience to design, build and manage secure and scalable cloud environments that help you meet your business ambitions.  

Many MSPs have strong relationships with key cloud service providers, with some working with multiple providers. As a result of this, they often have access to and can deliver on the latest innovations or strengthen cybersecurity postures through consistent updates to the cloud.   

A significant part of working with MSPs is that they have the skills and capabilities to deliver on cloud projects – make sure to choose a provider that has the experience of working within the industry that you operate in, to help meet standards and ease compliance. 

Is the cloud secure? 

As organisations need to migrate large amounts of sensitive data to store within their chosen cloud platform, data loss and leakage, and data privacy and confidentiality are top concerns and can lead to delays in migrating to cloud. Ultimately, organisations are responsible for keeping their data secure within cloud environments, however, they may not have the knowledge or skills to implement strong security guidelines to protect their cloud infrastructure. 

Although security in the cloud has a poor reputation, cloud providers invest millions on features and capabilities that can help protect cloud platforms. These are constantly updated to address the latest cyber security threats, helping to safeguard your cloud infrastructure.  

Embedding security practices in from the cloud’s foundations is important as these security guardrails can help to protect your organisation, align with industry standards and best practices, and ease compliance. Brightsolid’s Cloud Foundations can help to protect your data and assets by delivering a cloud infrastructure with pre-configured networks, security, access, and compliance guardrails, which enables you to securely kickstart your cloud journey.