The business scenario is ever-evolving with companies having multiple locations, a remote workforce, and several computing platforms, applications, and tools. With such changes, it poses some challenges to the IT departments to cope up with effectual communication and collaboration. This is where the cloud migration services providers offer effective solutions to business challenges. Cloud technologies are gaining traction and so more businesses are switching to embrace the same.
Though migrating to the cloud has its benefits, many companies embracing the technology create some overwhelming challenges. In this blog article, we will walk you through the three of the most common cloud migration challenges and ways to win over them. Read on to learn more.
1. Resistance to cloud adoption
When you migrate to the cloud, it is mostly the employees, who resist the change. To be honest, cloud migration leads to numerous changes and interruptions, especially when it comes to new systems, leadership, and business processes. The moral of the story is that if people pose the greatest challenge, your business strives hard to implement the cloud migration.
The solution:
The change in management plan with a couple of effective strategies will make the transition easier if people resist cloud adoption.
Opt for integrated tech solutions:
When picking out cloud technologies for your business applications, give integration and usability the top priority. Make sure you use tools that user-friendly and intuitive features to make your employees accept it without any resistance.
For instance, Microsoft cloud migration and applications integrating with your existing tech load-up appear more appealing to users, as they can flawlessly connect the new apps or tools to their additional job. Integrations help in making the workflow run smoothly as well as boost employee performance. Communicate all such benefits to all employees before declaring the cloud migration process.
Make senior leadership involved:
If you want a smooth cloud migration process, start with the senior leadership team. The top leaders in your organization can influence employees so that the migration sails smoothly. Your leaders need to understand the business requirement and goal of the migration, and communicating the need to the company and its employees. When people understand the reason behind cloud migration, they will support the same.
When you demonstrate excitement, support, as well as the value of such changes, the leadership team can introduce an optimistic culture within the organization surrounding the cloud migration process and motivate higher adoption rates.
Focus on resources and training:
Though cloud migration makes life convenient for all in your business, the initial change could be challenging. The employees will find the new technology complicated, confusing, and hard to incorporate. Therefore, you must invest in employee training and support to become familiar with new tools and applications.
Invest in an effective onboarding program to let your people have an understanding of the new technology. Hire professionals to train and support your staff to use the new tools or applications to ensure a smooth migration. You may even allocate some internal staff having cloud expertise and answer technical questions as well as provide support during the training process.
When it comes to user buy-in and adoption, it could become a frustrating experience. However, when you plan, keep communication clear, and emphasize employee training, education, as well as support, it is easy to implement a winning cloud migration process in your company.
2. Cost of cloud migration
Cloud migration will give you great returns on increased competence, modernized business processes, and reduced admin expenditures, but the initial switch is still heavy on your budget. You will need to consider the immediate migration cost as well as financial risks in the long-term for slow or low cloud adoption and employee training once the migration is in place.
The major costs are training expenses for people, tools, rewriting application structural design for cloud, training people on new systems, cost of bandwidths, and performance challenges including interoperability, latency, downtime, and reliance on non-cloud applications.
The solution:
You can keep cloud migration costs low when applying these tactics.
Focus on batch adoption:
Cut back on the costs by migrating to cloud technologies gradually. Yes, choose batch adoption that has the benefit of breaking down things that are financially challenging into simpler, manageable parts with time. When you migrate in batches, your business need not pay a huge amount upfront, thus ensuring more choices and flexibility.
Planning is the key to success:
Think of a powerful change management strategy to help you deal with the scope of cloud migration and the disruption level to your company.
Assess your business goals and needs with forethought, the existing condition of your company’s IT operations, as well as the cloud alternatives available. The assessment and valuation will let you detect potential challenges, requirements, and opportunities that can help you gear-up for to ensure a successful cloud migration.
Switch to a hybrid cloud option:
Based on your computing and business requirements, a complete adoption might not be necessary. Therefore, if you are wondering how to benefit with cloud migration without too much investment, you can choose a hybrid cloud option.
When you use applications that have continuous use, the financial rewards or initiatives are limited when moving fully to the public cloud. In these scenarios, you need a hybrid cloud solution, making more financial sense for your business. You may switch to applications with diverse use and keeping the remaining in your private or on-premise cloud operations.
The costs and risks related to cloud migration are overwhelming, however, with meticulous planning and assessment, you can win over these challenges and create a path for successful migration without creating a dent in your wallet.
3. Lack or dearth of skills
Though cloud migration has multiple benefits, the complications of the process deter many businesses midway before making a switch. The greatest challenge is finding the right people with the expertise to deal with a successful migration. With more companies adopting cloud, the demand for migration professionals has increased manifold resulting in more demand compared to the supply.
Based on the findings of McAfee, the lack or dearth of expertise in cybersecurity is the primary cause of slow cloud adoption for at least 40 percent of IT experts. The greatest problem is staying competitive.
The solution:
The best way to deal with the skill gap is by finding the right talent in the industry.
Train your existing IT team:
The dearth of IT professionals with cloud migration skills might be the greatest challenge for adopting the technology. Then, if your business does not have the right people to hire skilled IT professionals, you must focus on other options. One way of dealing with the problem is by training your existing IT team with cloud computing skills within the organization, a tactic that has many benefits.
When it comes to your existing resources, they are aware of the legacy technology you use and current business processes. Therefore, when you train them, for instance, in Microsoft azure pros and cons of cloud services, they will make useful contributions to your business fast once they acquire the required skillsets. Hiring new employees and onboarding them is both expensive and time-consuming. Therefore, when you train your current IT professionals, you can save on costs and ensure an improved investment financially.
Then, training your existing staff is not a simple approach either. That is because the shelf life for cloud-related expertise is short-lived due to quick releases of new cloud technologies. It calls for a strong promise for educating and training your existing IT team consistently to ensure the best talent works in your company.
Use an incremental technique:
Yes, employing an incremental tactic will let go of some of the pressure of sourcing the best talent in the industry. When you consider smaller cloud migrations of the primary applications, your existing IT experts can learn and gain knowledge about the systems with time and not a complete cloud migration at the same time.
Implement a powerful and successful training program:
You can execute a successful training program for your existing IT team to bridge the skill gap. Here is how:
When it comes to an IT training program, it is not a cakewalk. Then, if you play by the rules of the game, internal training will let your business move forward with flawless cloud migration.
Use your existing resources to learn cloud computing to stay relevant, competitive, and make the training program an integral part of your business strategy. When you compare cloud-based solutions, search for vendors to help you with enthusiastic resources to ensure a successful cloud migration. Trained employees in cloud technologies will become your company’s greatest assets in your IT team.
Final words
Migration to cloud systems is a complex process for all businesses today. Though this process has many challenges, they are not impossible to overcome. It calls for your effort, patience, and time. Of course, you need the right resources with cloud computing skills to make the migration process successful.
The key to success is to identify the possible hurdles and risks initially and develop a sound plan to deal with the challenges. With careful strategies and assessment, you can steer your way through the intricacies of cloud adoption and make the most out of cloud-oriented IT systems and operations. Cloud migration is the need of the hour if you want to stay relevant and competitive.
