To grow and succeed in today’s business environment, businesses need to deploy and manage cloud services, using vendors who promise to deliver outstanding results from the complex undertaking. A recent Cisco Global Cloud Index study predicts that about 94% of enterprise workloads will get processed on the cloud by 2021. Even with the attractive benefits offered by the cloud, businesses can be justified in being extremely nervous if not downright reluctant to sign up for such a transition. There’s no doubt that many businesses have achieved success with their efforts to adopt the cloud. Others need to research the issues and challenges involved, so that they can successfully strategize to win internal support and undertake the transition. They’d need to assign the job to external resources with the right knowledge and expertise, if they want to insure against a failure
Cost of Adoption:
Cost of cloud adoption today is really not a challenge as it is not like an upfront investment into an expensive technology. Most cloud vendors charge by usage, so businesses spend in proportion to their growth, which makes it a very advantageous financial model. However, expect serious financial concerns to crop up with the migration if its adoption is low or slow. If the migration results in performance issues, your costs could go up with latency, interoperability, dependencies on non-cloud apps and downtime. Rewriting application architecture for the cloud is expensive, as are the tools and resources needed for successful migration and the cost of training them. You would also need to ensure connectivity and good bandwidth for the service. Remember that, as a business grows really big, expenses will decrease and may even stop being a matter of concern. Companies can actually save on the cost of IT infrastructure which would be needed with a full-fledged implementation. Companies also get to increase revenues as they reduce the opportunity costs of not adopting the cloud. Costs also go up when people take decisions without sufficient knowledge, hire unqualified resources or have to retrace their steps because their initial decisions were hurried and wrong.
Security Risks:
Initially considered a major challenge, the perceived risks of cloud security include data loss, data breaches, regulatory compliance issues and the growing sophistication of hackers. But these are challenges faced by all IT systems whether on premise or on the cloud. As a more modern technology which is improving constantly, cloud offers far more ways to securing your data. Cloud’s layered architecture enables you to put rule-based traffic restrictions, load-balancing applications, encryption and additional firewalls in place to prevent attacks and avoid threats.
Now that you are aware of the capabilities of the cloud and its offerings, you can consider your business objectives in adopting the cloud and check how the cost, technologies, regulatory compliance, firewalls and security protocols would suit your needs best. Then you can go ahead with your choice of vendor, to get the answers to your queries before you have it deployed in an optimal manner.
Lack of Cloud Expertise:
Cloud is relatively a new technology and its scope keeps growing as we speak, to offering better capabilities, security and cost reduction. The complex architecture of a cloud installation and its maintenance require real expertise and skills. Migrating an existing operation to the cloud is even more demanding an exercise, and you need a vendor who will do this well and leave you to focus only on operating your business. Not finding skilled people to manage the migration could mar its effectiveness. Better postpone your plans, than going with less qualified resources.
Lack of Preparation:
If you fail to prepare for the change, as you adopt the cloud, your business could get disrupted and affect your performance. Decide whether to migrate to the cloud fully or incrementally in manageable batches, and retain flexibility. Would you opt for public cloud or private cloud or go for a hybrid cloud which is a decision requiring a lot of forethought, preparation and planning. Businesses with spikes in demand will benefit from the cloud as it meets them with great flexibility, but businesses with a consistent demand can opt for hybrid cloud and migrate only the applications which have varying demand or usage. The consistent applications can stay on premise or on a private cloud.
Resistance to Change:
Resistance to change is a common feature with any migration, requiring people to adopt new systems, processes, protocols and even, leadership. This could evoke a huge challenge from people who resist such change and need for undergoing new training. You need to pre-empt such reactions, by making the change exciting and the need for re-training minimal, if the transition is to happen smoothly. Training internal employees to adopt to the new processes is a better strategy than trying to replace them with new employees whose knowledge of your business will also need to be instilled.
Along with managing the concerns above, enterprises need to adopt a culture of continuous learning to stay relevant and ahead of the changes which are sure to come in time. Cloud migration is a complex initiative which could offer some challenges, but none of them are insurmountable. Success comes to whoever recognizes them and manages them well.
