According to an estimate by Gartner, the total scope of the cloud market will be $186.4 billion this year, which is a 21.4 percent rise as compared to last year. IaaS is the most rapidly growing segment within the market, and will amount to over $40 billion, according to the same report. SaaS; however, is the largest segment at the moment, with revenue growth of over $73.6 billion expected. These numbers represent a market increase that will likely continue the upward trajectory in the coming years, with no signs of slowing down any time soon.
The reasons for so many organizations moving to the cloud include but are not limited to agility, greater scalability, cost benefits, potential for faster business growth, and an openness for innovation, which is generally absent from legacy systems. Despite this, the cloud computing has a number of inherent risks associated with it, which companies are having a difficult time with. While the IT and business landscape is investing in cloud technology and adoption to achieve the benefits mentioned earlier, the risks are gradually being realized, and unfortunately on the enterprise front, the problems are not being tackled adequately.
Just like any transformative process, cloud adoption and the subsequent movement of organizations to the new platform, can be made very seamless and trouble-free, given the right teams are put in place to handle the shift. In this article, we will discuss what the aforementioned challenges to cloud migration are, and what manner of cloud management teams can handle the responsibility of change.
Inadequate Cloud Service Quality
Since these are still the early years of cloud-based organizational operation, and many companies are still running on traditional systems, the quality of cloud services has not been optimized across the board, with a great many cloud service providers delivering sub-par service quality. This issue has led to a) executives hesitating with large-scale migrations due to the fear of poor quality cloud service, and b) the financial loss associated with service malfunction.
Bandwidth and Performance Costs
Systems acquisitions, technology management and equipment maintenance make for the bulk of costs when migrating to the cloud. Sometimes though, the cost can exceed the set budget due to unexpected pitfalls during transitions, which then leads to further hindrances in terms of slow pace. If the budget is hampered, the amount of bandwidth an enterprise can consume also gets reduced, and if the latter occurs, any degree of systems’ quantity is left unmigrated, which usually spells disaster.
The data that is received and relayed across cloud networks, especially during the migration phase tends to be huge and exhaustive which requires efficient and sufficient bandwidth, in order to mitigate latency and application related timeouts.
Data and Information Security
Another major concern that is bothering cloud managers and their organizations everywhere is the issue of data security. This issue, incidentally, is increased in magnitude if the number of vendors exceeds one, as with more vendors comes the risk of more third parties having access to some aspects of the organization’s data infrastructure and even storage. The security policies of the cloud service providers may be different from the organization’s, which could lead to disputes later on in the migration process, as well as the potential for breaches. Additionally, the most important pieces of data often need to be backed up, which requires further hardware and software investments.
IT Governance
The procedures and policies that come with each cloud migration (as dictated by the organizational and government regulations), require robust IT governance to make sure that the assets involved are maintained and controlled, while adhering to the business goals and plans of the organization.
It is important to mention that cloud-based systems don’t offer complete control over the operations and provisions of infrastructure. This causes IT governance issues, hindering IT professionals from providing sufficient risk-management, compliance and governance.
Cloud Implementation Issues can be Overcome by Training Migration Teams
The primary cause of the lagging behind in terms of optimization and large-scale troubleshooting is the lack of equipped and superbly trained teams to handle the migration from traditional systems to the cloud. The migration teams are responsible for handling not just the software-side adjustments and upheavals, but a large number of logistics-related tasks as well. If the teams themselves have a lack of technical skills, the entire organization can be hindered from migrating satisfactorily.
By training cloud management teams to handle the technical responsibilities associated with moving to the cloud, organizations can both improve adjustment to the new platform, and mitigate a lot of the inherent issues. Cloud training is advantageous for enterprises looking to move into the cloud, and improve their cloud operational capabilities.