In business, a barrier is never an invitation to quit, but instead to learn, surmount, and prevail. Obstacles to cloud migration are no different; with knowledge, foresight, solid leadership, and the help of excellent cloud service providers, your company can thrive in the cloud.
Don’t Let Common Obstacles Keep You Out of the Cloud
The cloud is the future of computing, offering unprecedented business agility and data analytics capacity. But getting there can be challenging. For every industry, enterprise, and department, any number of obstacles might stand in the way of a successful cloud migration. In most cases, careful planning and a great service provider can eliminate barriers to cloud adoption, but only if leaders are willing to recognize and contextualize those barriers, so that their solutions can be built with an informed approach.
In upcoming weeks, we’ll be breaking down those obstacles in detail on the Cascadeo blog so that you can overcome them and move your business forward. This week, we begin with an overview and discussion of the most common points of resistance to cloud migration and transformation.
Security
For enterprises with on-premises servers that are fully under in-house control, public cloud security can be difficult to fully conceptualize. We’re telling you that moving data from its current storage location, under lock and key, in your own location, into something called the “public cloud” isn’t a security risk? Yes. We are. It seems impossible, but it’s true: your on-prem servers are at least as vulnerable as a well-built public cloud architected with privacy and security as first principles. In fact, your public cloud may be more secure, since cloud features and tools like advanced access management are often more sophisticated and better monitored than on-prem deployments. Read about removing the barrier of cloud security concerns here.
The Cloud Skills Gap
Even in an era of thousands of tech layoffs, one computing labor shortage persists: cloud. If you’re committed to keeping your IT management fully in-house, this one is a bit harder to solve. Even if you find good cloud help, you’ll need to commit to routine upskilling, as cloud technologies constantly evolve. The answer, of course, is partnering with a highly certified managed services partner with a great SLA and built-in monitoring, alerts management, and remediation tools. Read about removing the cloud skills gap barrier here.
The Complexity of Migration
There’s no denying that transforming your entire IT environment is a massive undertaking. It demands time, strategy, organizational self-knowledge, and clarity of purpose. This, too, is a call for help: the help of a top-notch professional services team to aid you in prioritizing, customizing, and transforming your operations into their best incarnation, allowing innovation and growth at scale in the future. Read about removing the complexity of migration barrier here.
A Complicated Current Architecture
This problem is a variation on the previous one: How can you transform your operations when you don’t fully understand them as a whole? That’s why thorough discovery and strategy at the outset of any cloud migration are essential. Read about how discovery and assessment can remove the complicated architecture barrier here.
Legal Compliance Concerns
For some industries, such as finance, healthcare, and life sciences, there may be no more important issue than ensuring compliance with complicated legislative and oversight requirements. That’s why a well-built cloud environment adheres to clear and specific standards for compliance, and top-notch managed services build periodic compliance checks into their offerings, keeping organizations subject to regulatory oversight in good standing. Learn how regulatory compliance works in the cloud here.
Data Governance Worries
Along with the nearly limitless capacity for data collection and management available in the cloud comes the necessity for strategically using and controlling that data, and for continuously refining policies to stay on top of growing data stores and analytics functions. It’s true that a one-size-fits-all lift-and-shift might leave you in a difficult data governance position, but a true digital transformation takes your data responsibilities, needs, and future into account, building a data approach that grows as your company grows. Learn more about cloud data governance here.
Option Overwhelm
Anyone who has looked into cloud providers with much seriousness knows: the possibilities are vast, complicated, and entirely likely to prompt decision paralysis. Once again, clear strategic planning and qualified partners are the solution to finding the right cloud vendors, offerings, and services. Learn more about overcoming option overwhelm here.
Internal resistance
What do you do when you know a change will be good for your business, but the insiders who you trust to run your operations aren’t on board? This is the time for effective planning involving full leadership, with emphasis on company-wide goals. Chances are good, after all, that the best place to accomplish those goals is in the public cloud, with the most advanced offerings available to run and grow your business. Learn more about overcoming internal resistance here.
In business, a barrier is never an invitation to quit, but instead to learn, surmount, and prevail. Obstacles to cloud migration are no different; with knowledge, foresight, solid leadership, and the help of excellent cloud service providers, your company can thrive in the cloud. Join us on the blog in the coming weeks to read more about how to eliminate impediments to cloud adoption and facilitate a worry-free cloud transformation.
