Cloud, Cloud, Cloud – isn’t it too cloudy now-a-days! No, no it’s not about the weather, it’s the business where everything is too cloudy. Businesses have started moving towards cloud rapidly. That’s because of the benefits it offers – reliability, scalability and accessibility. There’s no doubt that the cloud computing industry is flourishing at a rapid pace and over past 5 to 10 years, there has been tremendous growth in this industry. Approximately, 72% of organizations have adopted the cloud technology and it’s likely to grow up to 91%, within three years from now.

You might think that adopting or migrating a business over to cloud platform/s would be a simple and easy process, but that’s not the case entirely. Desire to grow profit margins, competition and other business considerations keep driving entrepreneurs towards the adoption of Software-as-a-Service delivery model and cloud-based provisioning of their offerings. Though moving to cloud can be a cost-effective idea but it may also lead to failure if you don’t prepare your business well for its migration. While moving to cloud server hosting, things like capacity, security, reliability and employee training are vital, we MUST keep this in mind.

Let’s prepare ourselves by taking a look at the common mistakes when it comes to cloud migration –

• Assume all clouds are created equal –

All cloud services offerings are same, right? Nope, there isn’t a single point matching between them. Yes, cloud is divided basically into three categories – private, public and hybrid. But beyond these three, services are categorized as per the pros and cons too. Selecting the right cloud mix depends on your specified requirements along with the applications and infrastructure wherein you have already invested. For instance, a private cloud may offer greater flexibility and less scalability. So, at initial stage its better off working with a public cloud vendor for smoother cloud migration experience.

• Assume disaster recovery is the responsibility of the cloud provider –

One of the biggest challenge in the cloud environment is the application downtime at least in a base metal infrastructure. It’s completely your responsibility to ensure that the application required is available through cloud outages and service disruptions. Remember to keep and recover backup similar to that for any mission-critical application to keep downtime to minimum.

• Ignoring varying performance of different cloud providers –

It’s a common sense that performance of different cloud hosting providers will be different in different regions depending upon how one takes an advantage of the provider’s infrastructure and services. It might be any setup offered to you, your application is going to act in a unique manner. It depends on you, to plan for specific performance levels and prepare to twist them until your goal is reached.

• Migrating all apps to cloud –

Don’t make this mistake of migrating all business apps to the cloud. Instead you may choose a different approach for every application that is run. Assuming that all the apps are taken care of by the cloud service provider (CSP) is a misconception. CSPs are responsible for securing your business data but they don’t by default manage to secure your servers, virtual network, data or applications. For securing the applications companies need to plan and finance for internal resources or outside 3^rd party system integrators. Once initial configuration is done, it’s the responsibility of the company to continue monitoring, managing and remediating possible security threats to their systems.

• The lack of understanding of Total Cost of Ownership (TCO) once the cloud is deployed –

There are complex methods that are required to determine that will there be cost saving of your company with cloud but most enterprise IT shops aren’t willing to count the numbers. It is essential to have use-based accounting and cloud financial management systems available to monitor the actual cost impact and value of migrated cloud-based applications.

• Neglecting Connectivity –

While moving your website to the cloud, ensure your way to access the cloud is reliable i.e. check on whether your internet connection is strong. Usually, large companies prefer to choose low storage pricing, neglecting the internet connectivity. It may happen that your current broadband is unable to keep up with the demands of cloud storage. Fiber-based products, leased lines, EoFFTC and EFM provide faster and stable connections which can meet the demands of cloud storage and they have fixed repair SLAs.

• Looking only at short-term objectives –

Don’t plan on short-term objectives when you are thinking to move towards cloud. Simply thinking that what cloud can do for me right now isn’t going to work. It will only limit your future capabilities and may lead to accidental design limitations which could have been easily avoided with long term planning.

• Failure to plan for the unexpected –

As an entrepreneur, you should be ready for the various possible outcomes when you are using cloud for disaster recovery or for running application workloads. Not planning for these may lead to significant consequences from business interruption to impacts to the bottom line. For instance, what if cloud is breached? Can the cloud administrators view the confidential data? What if the cloud provider’s business goes down? All these questions should be given a thought upon.

Summarizing the content, memorize that there isn’t any harm in migrating to cloud but don’t underestimate some points before your movement. These are some of the common mistakes that entrepreneurs do repeatedly that results into downfall of business.