In the current digital age, organisations are heavily leaning on the technological advancements to drive growth and innovation. Cloud migration is one such significant and complex undertaking that accelerates broader organisational digital transformation efforts by modernizing the business processes, applications, and infrastructure.
However, the transition to cloud is often marred by many challenges such as misalignment with business objectives, poor migration planning, limited awareness on cloud cost management, lack of robust security measures, inadequacies in skills and change management initiatives. In this blog, we elaborate on how organisations can overcome these common pitfalls and emerge a winner for a successful cloud migration.
Challenge #1: Misalignment with Business Objectives:
When cloud strategy is prepared in silo without inputs and review from the Business teams, it results in several inefficiencies such as missed opportunity to uncover and address critical business priorities, poor cloud adoption, probability of increased risk exposure and security vulnerabilities, and failing to justify the funding required for cloud initiatives.
Remedy: Business-centric cloud strategy with clearly defined roadmap
All technology investments should directly contribute to and/or enable business goals and objectives. Thus, while documenting cloud strategy, it is imperative to involve key personas such as CXOs, IT Leaders, Business unit leaders, and key stakeholders from Procurement, Security, Operations, and Change management teams. Cloud investments and business cases should be categorically mapped to the tangible business value it provides or the competitive advantage it delivers. This coupled with establishing long term roadmap, roles and responsibilities and key milestones will remove ambiguity, clarify responsibilities and accountabilities of all the stakeholders involved to ensure successful transformation. Strategy, however, should be continuously updated and refined to adapt to the dynamic nature of the Business environment. As the Business priorities and market conditions change, so too should the strategic plan be, reflecting the changing Business needs.
Challenge #2: Poor migration planning
An incomplete or a partial migration plan leads to unforeseen delays in going live on Cloud, costly budget overruns, disruption to business operations due to failed deployment(s), potential data loss, negative user experience, reputational damage, and non-compliant cloud environment.
Remedy: Migration guided by proven industry frameworks or through a Cloud Centre of Excellence
Cloud migration should be planned thoroughly leveraging Industry frameworks (such as Azure CAF) by contextualizing it to the operational scenarios at the organisation. This will help in alignment to Industry standards and best practices that have been refined overtime through numerous implementations. In cases where the complexities are overwhelming, establishing a multi-disciplinary Cloud Centre of Excellence (CCoE) team during migration planning will help in successful transition to cloud. The CCoE team will formulate wave planning and determine readiness for each phase of migration, track progress and success against each wave to implement lessons learned for next wave. This will assure the migration is timely, technically coherent, financially feasible, and securely executed.
Challenge #3: Limited awareness on cloud cost management
The Pay-as-you-go pricing model on cloud simplifies provisioning of resources which requires stringent and robust cost control mechanisms. Limited awareness on cloud costs lead to sub optimal outcomes such as in efficient resource allocations, subpar architectures, uncertainties in cost forecasting, unpredictable expenses, risk of overspending, uncertainty in Return on Investment (ROI), and inherently wastage on cloud.
Remedy: Migration underscored by Cost Governance
While migrating, Organisations can leverage several discounting programs as well as consolidate or reuse the licenses already purchased for on-premises environments on the Cloud (BYOL). In addition to leveraging the discounts, several best practices in implementing processes and policies to monitor, control and optimise cloud costs can help in avoiding cost overruns. Establishing cost accountability, cost analysis resulting in optimisation opportunities (such as right sizing, resource scheduling, appropriate migration approach, automation, life cycle policies, usage commitments and others) for each workload helps achieve transparency and cost control on cloud.
Challenge #4: Lack of robust security measures
Without establishing secure environments, migrating business critical data and sensitive information on cloud may expose the organisation to data breaches and unauthorized access leading to compromised data confidentiality, integrity, and availability.
Remedy: Understand the Shared Responsibility Model to implement security controls and policies
While Cloud providers are responsible for securing certain aspects of the platform, Organisations are responsible for securing the workloads and data depending on the migration strategy. It is imperative to establish a defence-in-depth mechanism across each stage of the Cloud operating environments (defining controls, policies, and best practices for IAM, encryption, secure configuration baselines, patch management, DLP, IDS/IPS and other custom guardrails) to ensure security risks are adequately managed on cloud.
Challenge #5: Inadequate skills and poor change management
One of the primary challenges that organisations face during cloud migration is lack of cloud expertise and inadequate change management plan. Transitioning into the new cloud environment and managing the operations require cloud skills and designing new processes that are cloud-native to unlock the full potential on cloud.
Remedy: Learning Pathways to Cloud
Organisations should design a comprehensive strategy to assess the skillset gaps of the personnel involved in cloud migration activities. Once the gaps are identified, training programs should be designed as per the needs. Continuous learning plays a pivotal role in ensuring the Cloud Team leverages the latest advancements for better efficiency, security and performance and get the best value from cloud investments. Alliance and vendor relationships can be leveraged to ensure continuous learning culture is established and learning resources are accessible to the Cloud Team. Organisations can leverage the CCoE to streamline the training and change management activities.
KPMG has helped multiple Organisations migrate to cloud and transform cloud operations aligned with business goals. We helped firms improve customer experience by redesigning customer journeys, quickly respond to market changes by establishing Agile practices across the Cloud value chain, reduced risk through extensive planning and execution, improved operational efficiency by establishing best practices, guidelines, standards, and guardrails.
