I’ve heard many times that if you’re not making mistakes, you’re not making progress. If that’s true, we're seeing a lot of progress made this year in cloud migrations!
Here are the three errors that I see enterprises repeatedly committing.
Mistake 1: Moving the wrong apps for the wrong reasons to the cloud. Enterprises continue to pick applications that are wrong for the cloud as the ones they move first. These applications are often tightly coupled to the database and have other issues that are not easily fixed.
As a result, after they’re moved, they don’t work as expected and need major surgery to work correctly. That’s a bad way to start your cloud migration.
Mistake 2: Signing SLAs not written for the applications you’re moving to the cloud. When I’m asked what the terms of service-level agreements should be, the answer is always the following: It depends on the applications that are moving to the cloud or the net new applications that you’re creating. Easy, right?
However, there are many—I mean many—enterprises today that sign SLAs with terms that have nothing to do with their requirements. Their applications use the cloud services in ways that neither the cloud provider nor the application owner expected. As a result, the cloud provider does not meet expectations in terms of resources and performance, and the enterprises have no legal recourse.
Mistake 3: Not considering operations. News flash—when you’re done migrating to the cloud, somebody should maintain that application in the cloud.
This fact comes as a surprise to many; in fact, I get a call a week about applications that are suffering in the cloud. Those callers’ organizations assumed that somehow, someway the cloud would magically maintain the application. Of course it won’t.
Remember that you have ops with on-premises systems, and you should have ops with cloud-based systems. The good news: The tasks are pretty much the same.
I hope you won’t make any of these mistakes, but chances are good that you will. If you must make them, I hope you’ll recognize them more quickly thanks to this list and recover sooner.