5 Organizational obstacles to cloud migration with solutions
While the benefits of migrating to the cloud are many - improved operational efficiency, reduced costs, and improved scalability to name a few - there are just as many obstacles that can prevent your organization from achieving a successful migration.
Migrating to the cloud is an organizational effort and requires more than just a few members of your DevOps team to pull off. Unless the organization is rowing in the same direction, your migration efforts can sputter, stall, or fail altogether.
Let’s look at a few key obstacles that can get in the way of your cloud migration and some ways you can effectively mitigate those issues.
Not Understanding Why You Need the Cloud
Any simple web search will give you the benefits of migrating to the cloud, and we’ve already listed several of the top ones. However, these are just generic benefits that anyone can realize. They don’t necessarily speak to your organization and aren’t enough to help drive the migration push.
Solution
Determine your organizational “why.” Work with your team to generate the specific reasons for your migration and the anticipated benefits. If you’re looking at improving operational efficiencies, then in what areas? How much of an improvement are you expecting? How will that improve your organization and the workloads of the people you employ?
If you’re looking at cost reduction, again, get specific. What are the expected cuts, in what operational areas, and how might you redirect those savings?
The clearer you can determine why you need the cloud, the more accurate it becomes for your organization.
Renowned Cloud migration and SaaS specialists can show you why others did it by sharing case studies of previous projects. Case studies can clearly outline the complete migration journey. Starting from the triggering pain points, you’ll understand how a solution was selected, what was needed to undertake the migration project, and see the outcome's real benefits.
2. Uncertain Cost of Migrating to the Cloud
Although reduced costs are a significant benefit of migrating to the cloud, the cost of the migration process itself cannot be ignored, and getting the necessary budget in place can be a significant endeavour. You don’t want large, unforeseen expenses to suddenly materialize and jeopardize the entire project or put your organization in a precarious financial position.
Solution
The best way to back up any uncertainty regarding money is with data and lots of it. Work with your proposed cloud solution partner to determine as many of the costs as possible so that you can present solid data. Some direct costs to consider software licenses, maintenance contracts, hardware, and rearchitecting your current infrastructure.
Your cost estimate will be much more accurate by selecting a partner with a long practice history of cloud migrations and SaaS development. However, be careful how you use these projections to promote the migration project internally. A team without prior cloud experience will usually take 3 to 5 times as much time to complete a migration project as if a group of cloud experts undertook it.
And because you’re focused on a technical solution, it’s easy to overlook costs that fall outside of that solution. Be sure to include administrative costs such as staff training (both initial and ongoing) and additional hires (to augment the skills of your existing team).
3. Internal Team Inertia
Migrating to the cloud represents a significant change for your organization. Change, for many people, can be difficult and can lead them to resist the change and threaten the success of your migration project. Much of that resistance, and the inertia it manifests, comes from the uncertainty associated with the change. People worry about increases in workload or responsibilities, being asked to do tasks they dislike or are outside of their comfort zone, or that their job will become obsolete.
Solution
Fundamental change management principles call for you to involve the people most affected by the change as early as possible and ensure that they feel as if they have a voice in their decisions. This helps reduce uncertainty and gives people a stake in the success of the migration.
You also want to put together a training plan to gain the necessary skills and certifications to work with the new technology. This should include a path for maintaining or increasing their knowledge over time. This displays your commitment to current staff and helps reduce the fears of losing their positions or worth in the company.
By reducing your internal team’s inertia, you spend less energy trying to prove the value and feasibility of your migration efforts and can spend more energy building the solution.
4. Lack of Technical Leaders
There’s a good chance that most of your organization, at all levels, lack experience with cloud technologies, and especially with migrating to the cloud. It makes sense since that hasn’t been a part of your hiring priorities up until now. However, it’s crucial to have access to someone who has “been there and done that” to help you avoid pitfalls and steer towards success.
Solution
You will need access to a cloud expert (or experts). That may be a new hire, or it may be an external consultant, but you want someone working with your team who has cloud migration experience. Also, you’ll want a seasoned communicator who can speak to both senior leaders and your staff - someone who can convey technical information to a less technical audience but can also sit down with your architects, developers, and operations team and speak to them on their level.
One thing to keep in mind is that cloud experts can bring their own biases to a project. If you haven’t yet chosen your solution but hire someone who has only worked with AWS, then there’s a good chance they’ll push in that direction. Choosing someone with experience in multiple platforms is best. Or, if you have a solution in mind, make sure they have experience in that platform.
Your cloud partner must be able to get you off the ground quickly by being actively involved in the migration, to the extent of being able to do the first, smaller project entirely on their own. This can provide immediate success and drive confidence that using the cloud within the company is a real possibility and can deliver benefits at a reasonable cost.
5. No Prioritization
Cloud migration projects can be large and complex involving many staff members from different organizational units in your company, working on various tasks. If those tasks aren’t properly planned and prioritized, milestones don’t get hit on time, and critical dependencies aren’t completed.
Solution
Project planning and prioritization are art in itself. Still, it also comes back to having a cloud expert who has dealt with other migration projects and knows how to prioritize the tasks against each other. You need to know how much time each task will need and how many people will need to be involved, and without the benefit of that experience, you run the risk of missing the mark for both time and resources.
Missed milestones mean increases in costs and time, both of which will seriously jeopardize the success of your cloud migration project.
Next Steps
You’ll notice that a key theme throughout this article is the issue of uncertainty. There’s nothing like a big, undefined black hole to stop people in their tracks and severely hamper your cloud migration efforts.
Your primary goal is to remove as much of that uncertainty as possible.
Where you’re currently at with your migration efforts will help determine your next steps and which areas to address. If you’re just starting, you want to begin by defining why you are looking to migrate to the cloud. If you’ve determined that and worked out all of the complex and soft costs, then you want to ensure that you’re working on change management with your staff and stakeholders. Or maybe you just don’t have the expertise in-house and need to hire a cloud expert, such as INGENO, to help you define everything else.
The takeaway is to realize that these obstacles can affect your cloud migration to some degree. You need to recognize these and take the necessary steps to mitigate them and ensure the success of your cloud migration.