Working with a range of clients, you start to appreciate the reality of what’s involved in moving workloads from a traditional on-premise delivery environment to the cloud. Whether it’s because of push-back from users, IT department concerns or feature gaps, migration is often hard.
While many providers suggest the moving into the cloud is as straight forward as cruising down a remote country road, in reality it’s often more like battling rush hour traffic to get to an appointment which you can’t be late for!
In fact, the 2012 Cisco Global Cloud Networking Survey asked over 1,300 people about their experience with moving to the cloud with some respondents reporting very negative experiences.
Ben Kepes, cloud commentator and curator of CloudU, recently published a white paper that included in-depth commentary on the recommended process and experience of transitioning to the cloud.
This is an area that I suggest those involved in assisting clients to transition to the cloud need to show some leadership in. The potential issues and considerations should not be ignored and become the elephant in the room.
That approach does not appreciate the real issues that most businesses face.
I’ve observed businesses attempt to transition entire workloads to the cloud as part of a ‘big bang’ approach, only to discover some serious issues that need to be resolved fast.
This highlights the need to get internal systems into good shape and, if possible, simplified before a migration.
A good approach to transitioning to the cloud is to do so piece by piece – such as moving just a few systems, like e-commerce or email, across at first.
To help manage the migration to cloud computing, Gen-i has developed an approach we call Pathway to Cloud, which has delivered successful results for a number of organisations.
The video below gives you an overview of this process. In the meantime, let me know your thoughts on my suggestions. What do you think are some of biggest challenges in migrating to the cloud? And how to address them?
