How To Avoid These 3 Pitfalls Of A Cloud Migration

Based on our experience, here are the strategies to avoid the 3 most common cloud migration pitfalls:

1. Don’t start without building an end-to-end plan:

Almost every client that has completed a migration wishes they spent more time planning. Most clients want to jump into the project and start, but without careful and complete planning of each step of the migration, you may find your project getting stalled to address problems that come up as surprises. Tasks like environment provisioning, approvals for vendor access, extraction of code and test data, are all examples of activities that generally take longer than you may expect. There are a few simple but important tools to initiate your project – a thorough RACI, and a Project Plan with all dependencies will save you a lot of finger-pointing and miss-communications of expectations. Run a proof of concept on various data extraction scenarios so that you determine how best to load massive amounts of data in the shortest time frame. Make sure you have purview into the legacy applications that you are migrating. Understand the data lineage, data flows, jobs and applications that are dependent on this data. From this information you will build a Wave Plan that will inform what needs to be migrated, and in what order it needs to be migrated. This is information will be used to set the translation plan and the test plan. Most large enterprises suffer from application sprawl, and it is natural to be concerned about how to untangle the mess before moving it to the cloud. Simple steps like these, done early in the project, will reap huge benefits.

2. Not falling prey to slideware about the migration execution:

You’ve bought in to the solutions and presentations from your cloud vendor and system integrator. Will all this promise and potential get converted into performance? Most system integrators do not have automation capability and rely on manual ways for migration execution. And your cloud vendor may not want to reveal the engineering gaps in their cloud platform. Assume and plan for issues to come up and make room in your plan and budget to accommodate for this. But in addition, look for all steps that you can automate. There are amazing advances in automated migration technology – from automated application discovery, wave planning, test script generation and code translation. Automation is key to achieving a consistent, predictable, and faster migration path. Your tools should be able to automatically capture ingestion lineage, orchestration, dependencies and migrate ETL (extract, transform, load) pipelines to the cloud, either by repointing or rewriting.

3. Not having a clear cut over strategy:

You may spend considerable time preparing your cloud architecture, strategy, and migration plan but don’t forget about your cut over strategy. The last mile is the toughest mile. To avoid post migration issues, it is imperative to define a cutover strategy that includes the following:

1. Alignment with business and product owners
2. Change management
3. SIT/UAT plans for data validation and reconciliations
4. Minimizing change in source systems while the migration is happening
5. Manage interdependencies.

Checkout Next Pathway's Cloud Migration Checklist

In summary, cloud adoption has become mainstream and is a strategic imperative. But getting there isn’t easy. Learning from other organizations, incorporating best practices, and avoiding common mistakes will only allow you to migrate faster, cheaper and with better results. Good luck!