Cloud migration is hard.
Can it be easy? Yes, when all the applications are well-designed, the databases have consistent and nonredundant structures, and security requirements are straightforward and well understood.
But that’s never the case.
Migrating from on-premises systems to the public cloud is hard, and it’s only getting harder. IT has already migrated the easy workloads; for very good reasons, you start with the easy migrations, the ones that need very little refactoring and have good platform analogs in a public cloud.
Now you’re getting to the workloads that require a lot of refactoring efforts, and they may not have exact platform analogs. In addition, they often have strict security and compliance requirements, as well as other issues that make migration complex.
Application migration gets harder the farther down you go on the list of applications to migrate. Two issues especially come up as you tackle these tougher migrations.
1. Budgets aren’t adjusted upward as the workloads migrated become more difficult
You spent $X to migrate the first 100 workloads to the cloud, but you’ll typically spend $X × 1.5 to migrate the next 100, and $X × 2.0 to migrate the 100 after that. If you don’t plan for these increased costs, you’ll likely run out of budget—and your migration will appear to be a failure.
2. “Crap! We forgot about security”
Ransomware and data breaches make the morning news on a regular basis these days. So security should be front and center, systemic to everything that you do, in terms of migration. But you would be surprised by the number of migration teams that forget about dealing with cloud security until the workloads are already in the cloud. In my experience, the number is alarming!
The migration teams then need to loop back and add security. If you follow that route, it delays the migration project and may cost twice as much to deal with security. And once again, company leadership sees it as a failure on IT’s part.