Cloud Migration: 5 Reasons Why It Fails and 3 Ways to Avoid The Risks

With all the challenges it comes with, cloud migration can fail, and these failures come in various forms. However, these issues can be avoided by implementing some strategic measures. Let’s take a closer look at the common reasons why cloud migration fails and how to avoid the risks.

The Reasons Why Cloud Migration Fails

Why does cloud migration fail? We’ve compiled five common reasons behind the failure of many cloud migration processes.

1. Lack of Planning
Many companies think that they need to hurry their cloud migration process. While being swift matters, proper planning is crucial. Many migration processes have failed without a clearly defined, well-researched, and coherent strategy.

2. Wrong Migration Approach
Companies often choose a migration approach that isn’t suitable for their needs and objectives due to lack of planning. They also often misunderstand their applications and operations. Some applications and high-volume operation systems don’t work well in the cloud, and companies need to establish this at an early stage.

3. Premature All-Out Actions
Many companies think they should prioritize business-critical applications at the early stage of migration. In the case of cloud migration, however, this isn’t recommended. Critical applications are often the most complex, so migrating them too early may be harmful to the business.

4. Insufficient Skills or Experience
Cloud migration usually only happens once in any company. Therefore, it’s common that many existing team members involved in the migration don’t have prior experience. Due to lack of confidence and capability, the migration process may become slow and challenging.

5. Vendor Selection
Due to point 5, almost all companies choose to work with third-party cloud providers. Failure occurs when they choose the wrong cloud provider and hand over the control over the entire migration process to the provider.

The Ways to Avoid Cloud Migration Failure

So, what can you do to avoid cloud migration failure? There are three effective ways.

Define your goals and establish a suitable strategy.
Before you proceed, you need to determine your objectives of migrating to the cloud — to embrace remote work, decrease your operation costs, restructure your business, or focus on agility. Identify your pain points and what needs to be addressed. Also, evaluate your assets, especially your systems and applications. Not every application belongs in the cloud; some can be optimized to work, but some just don’t work at all. Therefore, know what should go and what should stay. After determining all of these points, establish a solid strategy and relevant migration approach which will help you prevent failure.

Create a road map and move when the time is right.
Most migration processes don’t happen at once. During the migration, various issues — communication with team members, legal issues, sensitive data administration, new systems establishment, etc. — may take some time to handle. Regardless of the duration, however, it’s essential for you to have a clear roadmap with specific short-term and long-term goals. Start with simple actions and quick wins to build your team’s confidence and capabilities. Then, gradually move on to more complex, business-critical actions every time your team is ready. Remember, avoid being overambitious; secure and steady progress is what matters.

Invest in the right people in the right way.
A capable team ensures maximum outcomes. Hiring more experienced people to join your team is one thing to do, but these people won’t have as much knowledge of your current situation as you existing team members. Thus, you should also support them through a series of training, coaching, and mentoring programs to increase their capabilities. Another thing to do is to partner with a trusted and certified cloud provider with a proven track record of handling migrations.

Although different companies have different goals and levels of resources, these three ways are generally applicable for every organization going through cloud migration. Knowing the common reasons for cloud failure and how to avoid them is the key to quicker and smoother migration.