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The cloud has become an important tool for businesses across the globe. As you prepare your own organization for the big move to the cloud, you will need to outline the most important step in this process: migration. This stage is also one of the trickiest to navigate for new cloud users. There are numerous opportunities for you to make mistakes that can have an impact on both your business and your cloud services down the line.

Take a look at some of the most common mistakes that businesses make when moving to the cloud and how you can avoid the same blunders at your own organization:

 

  1. Not preparing before migrating.

Cloud migration will bring significant changes to your company. As such, you will need to do a bit of homework before you can initiate this process. You must prepare for migration by conducting a business analysis that looks at various aspects of your current IT environment and gauges how you can benefit from cloud services.

Setting this foundation will make it easier to outline your cloud expectations and find a provider that will accommodate your unique business needs. It will also help you identify which tools will help you facilitate a more seamless transition and what to move to the cloud.

 

  1. Failing to understand how migration should work.

Not all cloud migrations are identical. When moving applications to the cloud, you need to understand exactly how the process will work for each one. Where some will only require rehosting, some may need complete refactoring to work in a cloud environment. You must look carefully at any in-house applications that you want to move to the cloud and determine how you will handle their migration.

Without understanding exactly how to navigate this process, you could make the mistake of integrating applications in the wrong way. You might also find yourself needing to optimize app workloads post migration, which can a tricky (and expensive) endeavor.

You can help the migration process go more smoothly by leveraging automated tools that will properly match your applications and workloads to the correct cloud instances. You should also devise a thorough plan for every workload so you won’t overlook their individual needs.

 

  1. Moving absolutely everything to the cloud.

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Cloud migration can provide a wealth of benefits for your company, but it isn’t necessary to move everything in order to elicit these advantages. Many businesses make the mistake of deciding either to move all of their functionalities or none of them. In reality, you have the power to customize your cloud environment with the resources that will best benefit from use of these services.

Look at the platforms and information that you would like to move to the cloud. Are some of them better served in an on-premises environment? What would be the advantages and disadvantages of moving them? Aside from these questions, you should also weigh other key factors such as the industry in which your company operates. Medical and financial organizations, for example, may be bound to certain regulations that make it impossible to move some functionalities to the cloud.

 

  1. Pursuing too much customization (or too little).

Customization is a big draw to the cloud for many organizations, but it is easy to go about it in the wrong manner. Some companies try to over-customize their cloud environments to boost their efficiency or meet compliance requirements in certain industries.

While this will elicit immediate benefits, customizing your cloud infrastructure to such an extent could limit its migration capabilities in the future. If, for instance, a certain team within your organization customizes a deployment for its own needs, then others in the company will be incapable of using the same processes.

On the other hand, you may not customize your cloud environment enough to accommodate your business requirements. Some companies choose this option to prevent themselves from becoming dependent on one vendor for certain services or applications. The more generic the service, the easier it is to migrate it to another cloud. However, you shouldn’t avoid customization just for these reasons. You can only maximize the benefits of the cloud by tailoring your services to your business.

 

  1. Migrating too quickly.

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While 96 percent of organizations may be using the cloud, that doesn’t mean that your company should rush through migration in order to join them. Moving too quickly through the migration process can create a number of issues.

What if you were to move all your applications, platforms, tools, and software to the cloud all at once? After migration, you might find that some of these resources may not have been suitable for the cloud. If you expedite your move to the cloud, then you won’t have the time you need to test your various resources and determine which ones will make the biggest impact in a cloud environment and which ones will be better served in house.

To create as few problems as possible, you should begin the migration process incrementally. Move what is known as your “low-hanging fruit” before any other resources. Internet applications, analytics tools, and collaborative platforms are only a few examples of resources that you should move to the cloud first. By starting small, you will encounter fewer issues with functions that are incompatible with the cloud.