7 Challenges Businesses Face When Moving To The Cloud

Businesses are steadily accepting cloud computing. The cloud computing market is predicted to grow globally at a 30% CAGR extending to $270 billion in 2020.

It has completely revolutionized the way we store and access data. Now, smartphone applications use cloud computing to allow users store and access data that was not possible earlier.

As the cloud is growing continuously and businesses are reaping huge benefits from it, still, there is reservation amongst some business leaders regarding its usage.

Let’s go through the common challenges that businesses face during cloud migration.

Incompatibility

During migration to the public cloud, the common issue that most companies face is a disconnect between what they have on premises and how the service is used they are going to buy.

In the last few years, most cloud service providers have tried to create “connectors of sort” to make experiences more homogenous.

Though the problem is not about having a single pane of glass, the problem lies in the fact that the underlying constructs are different entirely.

This includes complex ramifications in how you use infrastructure and how you control the public and private portion of your hybrid infrastructure. The real problem is that only some want to do an all-in into the public cloud.

Data security

Yes, public cloud providers take responsibility for their clouds’ security, but they are not responsible for your applications, servers, and data security.

According to the CDW 2013 State of the Cloud Report, “46 percent of respondents face security of data or applications as a significant challenge.”

When your public cloud provider says it is in complete compliance with regulation, don’t consider it as 100% compliant. You will still be required to encrypt and secure your data. Further, you would need to invest in a suite of tools such as malware, antivirus, and secure web gateways from various cloud service providers to protect your data from cyber threats.

Make sure you ask the following questions before engaging with a cloud vendor.

●     Do you ensure to protect my data?

●     How you protect data from corrupted?

●     Do you have professionals on board if something goes wrong?

Lack of expertise

With rapid advancement in cloud technologies, more organizations are placing their workloads in the cloud. However, they find difficult to keep up with the tools, leading to the need for expertise. Businesses can deal with this challenge through Azure training of IT along with development staff.

The addition of cloud specialists to IT teams may sound costly too small businesses. Fortunately, various everyday tasks that specialists perform can be automated. Many companies are also switching to DevOps tools, like Puppet and Chef to perform multiple tasks such as monitoring usage patterns of resources while automating backups at decided time periods. These tools significantly contribute to cloud optimization for cost, security, and governance.

Segmented usage

Most organizations do not have an adequate cloud adoption strategy in place during their cloud migration. Rather, ad-hoc strategies are fueled and sprouted by various components. One among them is the cloud adoption speed. The staggered expiration of data centre equipment is also one of the reasons, which often led to intermittent cloud migration. Further, there are also individual development teams using the public cloud for specific applications and particular projects. These bootstrap environments have promoted maturation issues including:

• Ad hoc security configurations
• Isolated cloud projects with limited shared standards
• Absence of cross-team shared resources and learnings

According to a recent survey by IDC, out of 6, 159 executives, just 3% respondents explain cloud strategies as optimized. Fortunately, centralized IT, effective governance and control policies along with some heavy lifting can get adoption, usage, and cloud computing strategies inline.

Vendor lock-in

This has three categories: application lock-in, data lock-in, and infrastructure lock-in. The risks of Data lock-in occur during data extraction and switching them to other cloud vendor’s servers. You can minimize these risks by engaging with a cloud provider with leveraging experience moving large application products along with their corresponding datasets.

Application lock-in risks arise when you develop cloud-native applications.

Basically, this is due to time-consuming and costly reconfiguration of these applications to operate on a different platform. Though there are programs to remove these types of applications. Improving application portability using a virtualized container offers an alternative option.

Downtime

Obviously, you won’t compromise on service quality when availing services from the third party. Organizations expect complete data accessibility when their data is on cloud anytime from anywhere. The challenge most businesses face is they can access data only via the internet connection.

So, poor internet connection means disruptive cloud services and higher data accessibility risks.

The load, environment, and some users affect the performance of cloud infrastructure. Organizations need to ensure the resiliency of their cloud infrastructure to outages. However, it is hard to mitigate all server outages, but taking services from a reputable provider with a high resilience in place can help to protect your data.

BANDWIDTH COST

Though businesses can save money on hardware, they have to pay more for the bandwidth. However, this does not cost much for smaller applications, but data-intensive applications require more bandwidth thus costing high.

The faster delivery of complex data over the network needs sufficient bandwidth. Due to this, many businesses wait for a reduced cost prior to their cloud migration.

Bottom line:

Choosing the right service model according to businesses has become a major challenge for CIOs. The right service provider allows you to develop a customized computing environment.

The foremost step in cloud migration is an identification of the challenges while working with the selected cloud provider to navigate around these barriers to generate a thriving cloud environment for the business. For every platform- Public, Private or Hybrid, make sure you ask the right questions to the service provider and understand the risks to your business.

 

 

---

The author has no position in any of the stocks mentioned. Financhill has a disclosure policy. This post may contain affiliate links or links from our sponsors.