Cloud Migration Takes Time, Focus

Cloud migration continues to be a popular move among enterprises. It is, however, a complicated process. In fact, 75% of participants in a recent survey from Dimensional Research stated that their cloud migration projects take a year or longer, and a majority reported migration projects are running late and over budget -- not what you would like to experience.

But even so, 96% of survey respondents reported migrating at least some applications to the cloud. Once you make the commitment to the cloud, it's relatively hard to reverse it, as I discovered in reading "Crucial Steps for a Successful Cloud Migration," by Issy Ben-Shaul, CEO and cofounder of Velostrata, provider of software solutions for accelerating cloud migrations.

You Still Have Responsibilities

It is nearly impossible to move everything to the cloud. You will be responsible for the network on your premises, the connection to the Internet, the devices that your users employ, application licenses, software updates, and probably security. This means that your IT operations may be modified, but they will not be eliminated. With a cloud migration, some of your IT engineers may now be tasked with contract management since you are working with external systems and services.

Complexity Encountered

In another survey conducted by Morgan Stanley and reviewed in the Velostrata white paper "Overcoming the Challenges of Cloud Migration," over 90% of CIOs reported that the cloud migration did not meet their expectations. Complexity was the primary contributing factor. Application migration is indeed a complicated task that requires careful consideration of multiple elements, the white paper states, including:

• There are complex system configurations that depend on external systems and services such as databases, file shares, load balancers, and security.
• Bandwidth to the cloud is a perennial issue. Is the on-premises Internet bandwidth allocated for the migrated applications enough to support the application's requirements?
• Is the application "chatty" (require a lot of interactions with the user) and latency sensitive?
• Where is the traffic generated? If users are remote from the region in which the application service is deployed, will they be limited?
• You need to analyze the billing to ensure that you do not over or undersize your service since it can dramatically impact cloud costs and thereby reduce or eliminate your ROI.
• Don't forget the operations cost to you as well as the post-migration configuration management. You may have to expand your management tools or buy new ones.
• You will probably be migrating a large amount of data while still providing live services to users without interrupting their application use.
• Don't forget that once you choose a cloud provider or providers, you may experience vendor lock-in where you cannot move to another provider or back to your own premises easily.
• As always, you need to consider the security and compliance requirements that the cloud will or will not deliver.
• You are managing service-level agreements that may not mirror those that you deliver within your on-premises system.

Approaches to Cloud Migration

How you migrate to the cloud depends a lot on what you have, what you want to move, and what you want to deliver. There are three common approaches to cloud migration: