How to Reduce the Risk and Cost associated with Cloud Migrations

Cloud is the future. Most businesses have either migrated to the cloud or are planning to migrate. It is important to be mindful of the risks involved and keep the costs optimized.

In this article, we will cover the following:

• Key risks to avoid and what can be done
• Reducing the costs associated with cloud migration
• How a reliable partner can help

Key risks to avoid

1. Ensuring a clear and well-structured cloud migration strategy is in place

It is important to fully understand the needs and answer questions like if one cloud provider or multiple cloud providers would be better suitable. Each of the two has its own pros and cons. The second question to address is the priority of the migration, what migrates to the cloud, what stays on-prem, and what should be the sequence. For example, companies that have a lot of sensitive data, usually opt for storing the data on the on-prem data center and use the public cloud for computing power, flexibility, connectivity, and scalability.

2. Existing architecture should be fully compatible

When migrating existing workloads, what happens if the existing architecture is not “fit for the cloud”, do you have a team with sufficient skills who can prepare the existing architecture for migration? It is essential to assess the existing architecture and plan accordingly. Migrating becomes easier for enterprises that have microservices architecture, their containers can be orchestrated with tools like Kubernetes or Docker engine.

In both cases, if you’d like to get expert help on the migration process, you can request a FREE POC here.

3. Data is safe and no data is lost

Backup is a must even if you’re not considering migration. But specifically for migration, you must have a backup for the files being migrated. During the process, issues such as corrupt, incomplete, or missing files might occur. With the help of the backup, you can easily correct the errors and restore the data.

4. Costs are well optimized

Cloud offers flexible pricing but it can often be confusing if you are new to the cloud technology. Analysts at Gartner estimated that as much as 70% of cloud costs are wasted.

In cloud computing, you pay for computing, storage, and data transfer. And each cloud vendor offers a range of different instance types, storage services, and transfer options depending on your use case, cost requirements, and performance expectations. Finding the best can be a complex challenge. Companies that fail to figure out what they need usually waste their costs because they don’t use the opportunities they have to the full.

5. Minimum latency

Unwanted latency is one of the most underestimated risks in cloud migration. It can occur when you access applications, databases, and services in the cloud. Latency is especially critical for IoT devices, e-commerce websites, video streaming solutions, and cloud gaming platforms where customer experience is crucial. If you have applications that require immediate responses, a delay of a few seconds can pose serious damage to your business. It can not only lead to frustration and disappointment but also impact your brand reputation.

6. No visibility and control

Visibility in the public cloud is among the top risks in cloud migration. It affects network and application performance. If you rely on your own on-premise data centers, you take full control over your resources including physical hosts, networks, and data centers. But when switching to external cloud services, the responsibility for some of the policies moves to cloud providers depending on the type of service. As a result, the company lacks visibility into public cloud workloads.

According to a recent survey from Dimensional Research, 95% of respondents say visibility problems have led them to experience an application or network performance issue. And 38% state that insufficient visibility is a key factor in application outages and 31% – in network outages.

7. Security

According to a recent ITPro Today study, the complexity around security is the biggest migration risk in cloud computing the majority of companies face (57%) followed by cost and legacy infrastructure. Moving data to the cloud involves a lot of security risks: compliance violations, contractual breaches, insecure APIs, issues on the provider’s side, misconfigured servers, malware, external attacks, accidental errors, insider threats, etc.

Some organizations are aware of these risks and take proactive measures to avoid them. But cloud maturity of the majority of organizations is still relatively low. As a result, they are struggling to resolve security issues as they don’t have enough skills for that. 92% of respondents say they need to enhance cloud security skills while 84% confirmed they needed to add staff to close the gap. Only 27% of responding organizations were confident in their ability to address all cloud security alerts.

Reducing the costs associated with cloud migration

The remote workforce has become the new normal in no time, making cloud migration more essential, followed closely by cost management. More and more companies are planning or in the process of transitioning their applications to the cloud, but it is not a cheap process and has the potential to eat up a big chunk of the budget.

451 research reported that slightly over 50% of the companies that recently migrated to the cloud mention cost as their biggest pain point. Applications that were built for on-prem behave differently on the cloud, it requires more attention at the beginning of the migration process for restructuring the application for the cloud environment.

Here is a list of key aspects to consider to control cloud migration costs:

1. Start well – ensure you are choosing the right size for your cloud infrastructure

Avoid paying more and having excess unused space by looking for the smallest infrastructure size that can take care of all your requirements. If you fear your requirements might change or increase in the coming time, it is much easier to add more space later than it is with a physical server.

2. Take the expert help

Cloud architects and migration engineers can help in planning your migration journey and optimize the costs for you. Service providers like LogicEra, can help in the initial phase or the complete process, depending on the size of the team you have internally. They can help in cutting down the time and migrate faster. If you require continuous support or are looking to optimize costs in your existing cloud framework, LogicEra experts can help and support you and your team in that.

3. If your workloads are predictable and stable use reserved instances

Based on your consumption, you are charged on an hourly basis based i.e. the “on-demand” rate. These charges are based on factors like size, the power level of hardware and software in use, the region you’re in, and the times you’re actively using. If your workloads are stable and predictable, it is better to commit to reserving a server for a longer period of time (maybe one year), it can give you a much better deal as compared to the hourly rate. Reserved instances can save a lot of money over the life of the cloud environment.

4. Ensure a holistic approach while planning your migration

It is crucial to have a holistic approach while planning for migration. If you plan to migrate in parts, you could run into a situation where applications/systems were working well in harmony and suddenly aren’t. A holistic migration plan, allows you to determine the applications that work together, and you can keep them on the same servers or create APIs to connect and keep the business running efficiently.

5. Cost-controlling tools that can help

You can consider implementing some cost optimization tools to keep a check and follow the best practices. Tools like CloudHealth or CloudCheckr help in monitoring, analyzing, and reporting on all cloud resources in use and help in saving money and preventing overspending.

These tools are helpful but do not provide the human element that managed service providers can provide, but they can work along to ensure the maximum level of cost savings is achieved.

Reduce risks and cost with a trusted partner by your side

We can’t deny the benefits of cloud migration: flexibility, scalability, automation, ease of collaboration, etc. The complexity of existing infrastructure, vendor monopoly, managing multi-cloud, security, data loss, latency, and wasted costs – all make it difficult to move to the cloud. To tackle these and other challenges companies require sufficient cloud IaaS skills.

With this in mind, businesses may find it helpful to partner with trusted cloud partners who have proven experience in migrating to the cloud. LogicEra is one of the leading Microsoft Azure partners in UAE. We have a strong portfolio of cloud migration projects across a variety of industries: telecom, fintech, healthcare, retail, and more.

• Our expertise in cloud computing includes on-premise-to-cloud migration and cloud-to-cloud migration.
• We offer professional DevOps service, including Cloud adoption (architecture, migration, optimization), building and streamlining CI/CD processes, security issues detection/prevention (DDOS & intrusion), firewall-as-a-service, and more.
• LogicEra is a Microsoft Azure Gold Partner.

If you have any challenges with moving to the cloud, please contact us. Our experts will be happy to help you.