Born in the cloud startups have a unique advantage of being able to avoid the pain of application migration into the cloud. With no complex infrastructure to hold them down, organizations can go global instantly and experience immediate business results.
According to IBM, 65 to 75 percent of applications could benefit from moving to the cloud. To optimize the move, identify and categorize enterprise applications, then determine the cost of moving. Often a proof-of-concept trial is helpful, from which you can build a business case for migrating applications you’ve identified as good candidates. Ultimately, leaving money on the table could be the biggest business regret without migration.
As you consider moving applications to the cloud, it’s important to learn from others’ migration mistakes. Here is a list of three common mistakes, both mental and technological, to avoid when embarking on your migration to the cloud:
- Incompatibility: When moving applications to the cloud, the transition will go much smoother if the cloud service provider offers the same operating systems and middleware environments used in your own data center. The benefit of this compatibility is that applications can be moved to the cloud without requiring significant rewrites, saving time, money, and rewrites. Some enterprises might want to make performance enhancements to take maximum advantage of the cloud service provider’s hardware capabilities, but as in most situations, keeping the migration simple is the best case scenario.
- Progressive Migration: Deciding to move most of your application portfolio to the cloud may seem like you’re taking a proactive stance to benefit the company, but is often not the right choice. A better approach is to start slow by moving one application (a non-critical one is recommended) to the cloud. Additionally, choose an application that has a high success probability that will make a good business impact (for example, a mobile application). Once ROI is achieved, repeat the process for other applications.
- Security Challenges: As with most everything related to IT these days, security should be top of mind. When moving any application out of the relative safety of the data center to a third-party environment, there must be security considerations. The amount of security you apply to a cloud-based application should depend on the sensitivity of the data it deals with. For applications that deal with highly sensitive information, consider access controls, authentication, and encryption. Additionally, don’t forget about the compliance requirements that apply regardless of the application. As a best practice, figure out which applications need security and which don’t – having too many will slow down processes.
Are You Ready to Migrate?
Are you ready to migrate your applications into the cloud? Reach out to us at sales@perficient.com and download our hybrid cloud guide to learn more about the benefits of cloud.
