Incorporating cloud infrastructure into IT strategy provides a variety of tempting benefits, including cost and time savings, quicker innovation and increased security. But driven to make the transition as quickly as possible, organizations often skip over crucial steps and make mistakes that can eliminate desired benefits. 

The reality is that cloud migration is a complex journey, and rushing in without a plan will not provide benefits but could even facilitate losses. So how can organizations avoid mistakes when moving to the cloud? There are several aspects for leaders to consider before committing. 

You will need a plan

Shifting data to a cloud-hosted infrastructure may seem simple, but it can take months of preparation to ensure the process is seamless and effective. Migration requires a systematic plan to generate successful outcomes -- without it, business operations may be immediately at risk and organizations can sink money into the cloud without understanding why they are migrating in the first place.

An incorrectly set up program designed to run a process when employees create a new ticket could fail to trigger ticket creation, halting work and resulting in delays and monetary losses. Issues may remain unresolved for days or weeks if organizations don't have a plan or team to review cloud performance.

Planning starts by capturing the state of current IT infrastructure and identifying any challenges and necessary solutions, as well as details like implementation owners and anticipated length of application phase.

Once leaders have a picture of their current environment, they can envision short and long-term cloud goals, plan out the steps to achieve these goals and evaluate what resources and costs are needed to make the shift. An established strategy allows leaders to decide which data and in what size portions, they will begin to move. Implementation owners understand their roles and expectations, so decisions are intentional.

You don’t have to do everything at once

A common mistake companies make is looking at cloud migration as an immediate transition of all data and systems to a new house.

In reality, cloud migration is a process. There are often thousands of applications and data sets to migrate, so trying to do it all at once is unnecessarily resource-intensive and can lead to errors created by using an untested system.

One way to improve outcomes is to start by moving non-critical workloads to the cloud to test the system. If something goes awry, it can be fixed with little risk to the organization, and lessons can be applied to the next workload. Once enterprises get to business-essential programs, they can be confident in their process. Additionally, a progressive approach encourages organizations to think critically about each workload – if it’s accessible and cost-effective on prem, an organization may benefit from a hybrid approach.

Cloud environments are not simply new vessels for old data. As organizations migrate older data, they can also create new, cloud-native applications. Building a new solution directly in the cloud can enhance productivity.

You should hire a cloud team

Cloud migration is not a one size fits all solution – each aspect of the process should be carefully constructed with the individual organization’s needs and long-term goals in mind. This requires a team of cloud professionals that understand how to apply cloud best practices and developments to specific organizations. Years of experience in the IT industry does not necessarily provide the skills needed to support a shift to the cloud. 

Experienced cloud practitioners know to use tools standard engineers would be unfamiliar with, such as cloud formation and terraform for replica automation, which decrease human-made errors and create the ability to move applications from one work environment to another.

As leaders increasingly benefit from modernization and cloud transitions, leaders must develop their migration method and devise a customized strategy while shifting their workload in digestible portions. Each step is linked to one another, so an intentional, gradual approach can increase success. Understanding this allows businesses to minimize the possibility of errors during the migration process and fully utilize cloud capabilities for the long-term organizational benefit. 

Gloria Zhang, Director of Cloud Programs at ASCENDING