There are several issues that affect the migration of businesses to cloud providers, and software development companies aren’t in a hurry to reveal them.
Data Sensitivity
In a recent Forbes article titled “83% of Enterprise Workloads Will Be in the Cloud by 2020” it was revealed that 66 percent of IT professionals say security is the most serious problem encountered when adopting an enterprise cloud computing strategy. Moreover, data isn’t always applicable for migration from the tech point of view; this makes the data migration process one of the most complex points while re-platforming your solution.
How can businesses overcome the data sensitivity issue? There are steps you can take in advance. First, take some time to get a full assessment of your current system, and then carefully plan the migration process that will be performed by highly professional data engineers.
It’s Still Expensive
The Forbes article mentioned in the previous section refers to a report that states upfront migration costs often outweigh the long-term savings created by IaaS. Imagine company management performing a huge migration project that takes four years, investing an enormous budget, and spending a lot of time managing the team that was hired just for this project. In the end, the earliest the multimillion-dollar cloud migration spending can be returned is in 30 years. It’s too long to wait for your return on investment, don’t you think?
How can businesses prevent inefficiency when it comes to the costs of a cloud migration? It takes some planning up-front. Don’t become a victim of enthusiasm; ensure that you start the project only when you have a cost-benefit project estimate. Sometimes it’s better to continue using an internal server than to move to the cloud.
Geography Matters
As the cloud is all about having a worldwide network, cloud providers can’t avoid the latency issue. If your company’s application uses a data center situated on the other side of the planet, it works more slowly than it would on a local connection. One more difficulty when it comes to geography is the diversity of laws in different countries. The attitude toward data sovereignty is not the same in Europe as it is in the United States, for example, so European companies are worried their data centers in the U.S. can be accessed by local law enforcement, while their own data policy is regulated by the General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR).
How can a company protect itself from geographical issues that may arise in the cloud? Just be aware of the geography issue and take where your data center is situated into consideration when you choose your provider. In fact, many leading cloud vendors have built regional data center networks to allow clients to keep their data within their region. In this way, Microsoft offers Azure cloud services from two data centers in Germany, so that stored customer data is under full German company control as a “data trustee” and even Microsoft can’t access it without permission (from the company or the customers themselves).
“A half of business owners say the increasing barriers to globalization threaten their ability to: consume or produce cloud-based services (54% agreed versus 14% disagreed); use or provide data and analytics services across national markets (54% vs 15%); and operate effectively across different national IT standards (58% vs 18%)”- ADAPTING BUSINESS TO A DIGITALLY FRAGMENTED WORLD BY ACCENTURE
Lack of Business Flexibility
Let’s be honest and recognize that big companies that have existed for decades are not so flexible, yet migrating to the cloud means fundamental changes in business processes. Even minimal disruption of business processes can cause a company to collapse, and the scale of this collapse depends on the size of the company. Bigger projects mean bigger risks, and it’s understandable why companies prefer to avoid this. At the same time, fear of change can come at a much higher cost, as staying the same means ignoring opportunities to grow and evolve with the current market.
How can companies deal with the issue of business flexibility? Unfortunately, you probably can’t make your big company more flexible, but you can moderate the influence of cloud migration. We’ve seen the success stories of tackling cloud migration this way: for example, a mobile operator fully modernized the company software and, thanks to proper planning, it shortened the disruption of the telephone connection to one hour.
Read the full article on ModLogix
Originally published at https://modlogix.com on January 29, 2020.
