4 Pitfalls to Watch for When Migrating to the Cloud

by David Burkett, Feb 04, 2016

Everybody is talking about cloud technologies and how businesses can migrate to the cloud, and for good reason. From lowering costs to improving scalability and accessing wider markets quicker and easier: there are awesome benefits to moving to the cloud.

But there's a problem with cloud migration...

Bad advice.

There are “experts” in cloud technology and data migration attempting their best used car salesperson impression to preach:

"You will never lose data."

"Moving to the cloud is quick and easy."

"You should always move all of your applications and data to the cloud."

The cloud has amazing potential. Potential that innovative businesses across the world are already harnessing as a competitive advantage, but as good as it is, cloud migration’s theory of everything includes some caveats to the question “should I migrate to the cloud?”.

4 Common Pitfalls of Cloud Migration

1. Data not formatted correctly

Re-designing, mapping and migrating on-premises applications is hard enough as it is, don't make it harder with formatting problems between your legacy applications and your new apps.

2. Network bandwidth and latency constraints aren’t known or understood

Moving applications and data to the cloud imposes new demands on the corporate network and impacts two performance constraints: bandwidth and latency. Not properly thinking through the possible ramifications of our migration on your business's network can sink your migration.

3. Migrating too much or too little

Not all business should migrate to the cloud, and not all business's should migrate all of their apps. Sometimes cloud migrate is like re-inventing the wheel, a waste of time and energy.

4. Switching from one to the other with no overlap.

The biggest mistake that you can make is choosing not to run both old and new systems parallel for a short period of time. Once the new system is confirmed to be running smoothly, the legacy system can be laid to rest.

Cloud migration is no picnic, download our White Paper to learn more of the do's and don'ts of migrating applications to the cloud.