Top 20 Cloud Migration Risks & Tips To Mitigate Them

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Introduction

Cloud migration is essential for organizations aiming to remain competitive, not merely a passing trend. However, this technological transition carries many risks that can undermine even the best-prepared migration strategies. From navigating intricate IT architectures to securing sensitive data, the path to a successful cloud transition is challenging.

After careful analysis and in-depth reviews, we have enlisted this blog’s top cloud migration risks. Besides, the blog also offers actionable insights and strategies to safeguard your cloud journey. Let’s dive into the critical factors that can make or break your migration strategy, ensuring you’re well-equipped to conquer potential pitfalls and drive your organization’s growth forward.

Top Cloud Migration Risks & Tips To Mitigate Them

Explore the most common cloud migration risks and discover actionable tips to mitigate them, ensuring a seamless and secure journey to the cloud.

1. Unclear Cloud Migration Strategy

lacking a clear and detailed cloud migration strategy is one of the most significant yet absurd risks. Without a full-proof strategy, an organization fails to make many crucial decisions:

• IT Asset Distribution: It becomes difficult to determine which data and applications should be hosted on-premises, in public, or on private clouds. Most organizations opt for a hybrid model, combining all three. However, a solid strategy helps plan and outline the place of every asset.
• Choosing Cloud Platforms: With various cloud providers offering diverse options, selecting the right platform for specific use cases becomes challenging. A solid cloud strategy helps to identify the best cloud service provider that aligns with your organization’s needs.
• Application Deployment Model: Deciding whether to adopt a “lifting and shifting” approach to migrating existing applications to the cloud or redesigning them for cloud-native benefits can be difficult if you do not have a strategy. Options like serverless and containerized applications offer different advantages.

Failing to make these decisions beforehand can lead to higher costs, extended migration timelines, and increased complexity. Additionally, incorrect choices can expose sensitive information to unnecessary security risks.

How Can You Mitigate This Risk in Cloud Migration?

• Avoid the trap of hasty cloud migrations based on trends or recommendations. What is effective for one company may not be appropriate for yours.
• Establish a well-thought-out migration strategy to prevent high costs and potential failures.
• Perform a thorough assessment of your IT infrastructure and design the best approach to minimize risks, enhance productivity, achieve agility, and maximize ROI.

Before starting your cloud journey, answer these critical questions

• Why migrate to the cloud?
• What benefits do you aim to achieve?
• Do you have critical data that must remain on-premise?
• What capacity do you need?
• How many cloud providers should you use?

2. Security Issues

The Flexera Cloud Adoption Report 2024 highlights that security complexity is among the second most significant cloud migration risks for 81% of companies. Migrating data to the cloud introduces multiple security risks, including compliance violations, insecure APIs, provider-side issues, misconfigurations, malware, external attacks, accidental errors, and insider threats. While some organizations actively address these risks, many need help due to limited cloud security maturity and insufficient skills.

What Can You Do About This Risk in Cloud Migration?

• Major cloud providers like Azure and AWS offer robust security services, ensure ITAR, DISA, HIPAA, CJIS, and FIPS compliance, and invest heavily in data protection.
• Encrypt data during transmission and storage.
• Employ skilled DevOps and security teams for proper configuration and ongoing protection.
• Use multifactor authentication and set user access policies.
• Isolate workloads to minimize damage.
• Configure firewalls properly.
• Implement essential security controls.
• Provide training on cloud security best practices.

Read More: Cloud Security Posture Management

3. Unreliable APIs

When using APIs to facilitate communication between your software and cloud service providers, unreliable or insecure APIs can introduce significant cloud migration risks. If APIs are not adequately secured, they can become entry points for unauthorized access, potentially allowing attackers to exploit vulnerabilities. It could lead to data breaches, where sensitive information is stolen or compromised. Additionally, unreliable APIs might fail to perform as expected, causing service disruptions or data integrity issues. Ensuring that APIs are secure and well-maintained is crucial for mitigating cloud migration risks, protecting your organization’s data, and maintaining reliable operations.

What Can You Do About This Risk in Cloud Migration?

• Implement robust authentication methods to verify API users.
• Use detailed access controls to restrict API permissions.
• Encrypt data with reliable algorithms, such as 3DES or AES, rather than outdated methods like DES.

4. Risk of Data Loss

Before starting your migration, back up all data, including the files you will transfer. Cloud migration risks can lead to issues like file corruption, incompleteness, or loss. A backup lets you quickly restore and correct any problems, ensuring your data remains intact.

What Can You Do About This Risk in Cloud Migration?

• Backups stored on servers or in the cloud can mitigate data loss from outages or breaches and enable quick data restoration.
• Using multiple cloud providers avoids downtime, allowing you to deploy a replica on another provider’s infrastructure. Many cloud providers offer affordable backup storage options.
• Proper backup configuration for migrated data saves time and money, making it easy to recover any missing files from your old system.

5. Lack of Migration Visibility

Lack of visibility is a significant risk in cloud migration, impacting network and application performance. Unlike on-premise data centers, where you control all resources, cloud services shift some policy responsibilities to providers, reducing your visibility into workloads. This shift reduces transparency in workload management and monitoring. As a result, you may need help tracking performance, diagnosing issues, and ensuring all components work correctly, leading to potential performance problems and difficulties in optimizing your cloud environment.

What Can You Do About This Risk in Cloud Migration?
To enhance visibility and control, use performance monitoring tools provided by cloud services and third-party vendors. Key features to look for include:

• Essential monitoring with minimal manual setup.
• Easy integration with existing systems.
• Robust analytics capabilities.
• Configurable alerts for various issues.
• User-friendly interface with a gentle learning curve.
• Automated responses to specific alerts and threats.

6. Compliance and Regulatory Risks

Data moving from on-premises systems to the cloud becomes subject to varying and stringent data privacy laws that can differ by region and data type. Navigating these regulations adds complexity to migration and poses significant cloud migration risks. Non-compliance with these laws can result in substantial fines, legal challenges, and damage to your reputation.

What Can You Do About This Risk in Cloud Migration?

• Investigate and adhere to data privacy regulations relevant to your data and locations.
• Implement encryption and additional security measures to protect data during transmission.
• Choose providers who meet relevant data protection standards.
• Ensure your data protection policies are current and adapt to changing regulations.
• Consult legal experts to manage and understand complex compliance requirements effectively.

7. Complex IT Architecture

CIOs frequently identify the complexity of IT architecture as one of the significant cloud migration risks that can delay the process. To mitigate this, companies need skilled IT professionals to swiftly adapt their systems to the cloud. Enterprises using microservices architecture and container orchestration tools like Kubernetes or Docker generally face fewer risks. AWS and Azure offer tailored support for these tools, facilitating a smoother migration.

What Can You Do About This Risk?

• Assemble IT experts to audit your legacy architecture, address technical debt, and document dependencies.
• Redesign your IT infrastructure for a hybrid cloud setup to ensure consistency and compatibility.
• Use Infrastructure as Code (IaC) to automate resource management and provisioning, simplifying migration.

8. Data Loss or Corruption During Migration

A significant concern during migration is the potential for data loss, corruption, or incompleteness. These cloud migration risks can arise from technical issues, power outages, or human errors, causing executives to worry as they transition to new systems.

What Can You Do About This Risk?

• Ensure that you back up your data frequently during and outside migration.
• Store backups across different providers to mitigate risks of provider-specific downtime.
• Rely on experienced professionals for your cloud migration to reduce the risk of data loss.

Pro-Tip: Opt for our cloud migration services and relax while we help you manage backups, ensure data integrity, and navigate potential risks with expertise.

9. Data Breaches

Securing data and applications throughout cloud migration is critical. A pre- and post-migration security strategy alone is insufficient. As data and applications transition to the cloud, they pass through various intermediate states, each of which may present vulnerabilities. With a dynamic security approach that adapts to these stages, attackers can exploit these weaknesses to steal data or compromise applications.

What Can You Do About This Risk?

• Incorporate security planning into your overall cloud migration strategy.
• Adjust protection strategies to address vulnerabilities at every stage of the migration process.
• Continuously oversee systems and data during migration to identify and address potential threats promptly.
• Adjust security protocols dynamically as the migration progresses and continue to address evolving cloud migration risks.
• Ensure stringent access controls and authentication mechanisms to protect data and applications.

10. Data Governance

Companies, especially in sensitive sectors like healthcare, face significant risks in data protection and privacy regulations. These regulations require a governance framework that defines data ownership, breach response, and coordination. The cloud can complicate this issue if not managed properly.

What Can You Do About This Risk?

• Opt for providers that are inherently HIPAA, GDPR, etc., compliant.

Clearly define your non-functional requirements, including regulatory standards.

• Adhere to the compliance guidelines provided by your cloud service.
• Update outdated applications to meet current regulations, like GDPR.
• Continuously monitor and adjust to ensure ongoing compliance with evolving regulations.

11. Added Latency

Unwanted latency is a significant but often overlooked risk in cloud migration. It can affect applications, databases, and services, particularly for IoT, e-commerce, video streaming, and cloud gaming, where speed is crucial. Delays of even a few seconds can harm customer experience, leading to frustration, damage to your brand, and business losses.

What Can You Do About It?
To address latency, identify its causes, such as geographic distance between clients and servers or misconfigured QOS (quality of service). Solutions include:

• Optimize and localize the network.
• Divide traffic into distinct segments.
• Create connectivity across multiple cloud environments.
• Offload internet traffic at the edge.
• Connect with business partners for digital commerce and data exchange.

If these solutions are ineffective or costly, consider keeping latency-sensitive applications on-premise.

12. API Vulnerabilities

APIs are the connective tissue that integrates various components within complex cloud ecosystems, enabling seamless operations and efficiencies. Despite their crucial role, APIs also present significant cloud migration risks. Cyber threats often target them due to their exposure and potential vulnerabilities. Google Cloud highlights a troubling statistic: only 40% of companies have a comprehensive API security strategy, leaving the majority—nearly half—with only basic protections that may not be sufficient against increasingly sophisticated attacks.

What Can You Do About This Risk in Cloud Migration?

• Adopt stringent authentication and authorization practices.
• Deploy API gateways to manage and oversee traffic.
• Encrypt data to ensure its security during transfer.
• Conduct regular security assessments and updates to API security protocols.
• Stay ahead of emerging threats to ensure API infrastructure resilience.

13. Cloud Service Provider Risks

Selecting the appropriate Cloud Service Provider (CSP) is crucial, as each offers different strengths and capabilities. For example, AWS is versatile, Azure excels in corporate authentication, Oracle Cloud is robust in database management, and GCP is leading in data analytics. Misalignment with the suitable CSP can lead to significant cloud migration risks, as 21% of surveyed organizations had to repatriate workloads due to choosing an unsuitable provider.

What Can You Do About This Risk in Cloud Migration?

• Align CSP features with your application requirements.
• Use multiple CSPs to leverage diverse strengths and avoid single-provider dependency.
• Implement cloud migration tools to oversee workloads across different CSPs.
• Evaluate how your workloads perform in each cloud environment.
• Adjust your CSP choices based on performance and evolving needs.

14. Insufficient Network Security

Ensuring secure network connections between on-premises systems and cloud environments is crucial to prevent unauthorized access. Without solid security measures such as firewalls and intrusion detection systems, these connections are at risk of breaches.

What Can You Do About This Risk?

• Use firewalls to control and monitor traffic between on-premises systems and the cloud.
• Employ IDS to detect and respond to suspicious activities and potential threats.
• Encrypt data both during transmission and while stored to safeguard sensitive information.
• Establish Virtual Private Networks to secure connections between on-premises and cloud environments.

15. Interference Risks

Interference risk emerges during cloud migration when multiple stakeholders access and interact with the application concurrently. This risk becomes evident when, for instance, one stakeholder locks a specific table in the database, thereby preventing others from accessing or modifying it. Such scenarios can disrupt business operations and hinder productivity.

What Can You Do About This Risk in Cloud Migration?

• Use granular permissions to manage and restrict access to critical resources and tables.
• Employ sophisticated locking mechanisms to minimize conflicts and ensure table locks do not excessively block other users.
• Monitor and review user activity to quickly detect and address any interference issues.
• Perform routine audits to assess and adjust access controls and locking strategies to better align with migration needs.

16. Extended Migration Timelines

For large enterprises with decades-old legacy applications, migrating to the cloud can be complex and time-consuming, often leading to operational bottlenecks and potential revenue loss during the transition. Extended downtimes could even result in customer attrition.

What Can You Do About It?

• Assess your architecture, applications, and processes before migration to pinpoint and resolve potential issues.
• Involve skilled professionals with deep cloud computing expertise to assess and mitigate migration risks effectively.
• Focus on migrating only necessary applications and data, avoiding unnecessary transfers to save time and resources, and optimizing critical components for better performance.

17. Skills Gap

Migrating to a cloud computing environment introduces a range of complex new technologies, processes, and integrations. Existing IT teams may need more skills to manage these changes effectively within the new infrastructure.

What Can You Do About This Risk in Cloud Migration?

• Provide comprehensive training programs to your team to develop the skills necessary for managing cloud technologies.
• Ensure that consultants offer knowledge transfer sessions to equip your team with essential skills.
• Develop a dedicated internal team or designate cloud champions focusing on cloud technologies.
• Establish a structured upskilling plan to develop your team’s capabilities continuously.
• Regularly assess the cost-benefit ratio of external consulting versus internal training to maintain budget efficiency.

18. Inefficient Cloud Spending

Cloud pricing can be complex, especially for newcomers. Gartner analysts estimate that nearly 70% of cloud spending could be inefficiently allocated. Cloud costs encompass computing, storage, and data transfer, with each provider offering various options tailored to different needs and budgets. Determining the best configuration can be challenging as companies waste money not fully understanding or utilizing available options, leading to inefficient spending. These inefficiencies highlight significant cloud migration risks, including unexpected costs and budget overruns.

What Can You Do About This Risk?
You can opt for different cloud optimization strategies, a few of which are given below.

• Remove unused instances.
• Adjust resource sizes as needed.
• Use autoscaling to match demand.
• Move infrequent data to cheaper storage.
• Set alerts for budget limits.
• Consider hosting in different regions.
• Invest in reserved instances.
• Use spot instances for flexible workloads.
• Take advantage of available discounts.

19. Data Dependencies

Transferring unnecessary or outdated data is one of the significant cloud migration risks. You don’t want to move every table or field; instead, focus on migrating only the data that is actively used or valuable in the new environment. This approach saves costs and prevents cluttering the new system with obsolete data. Data dependencies, with multiple tables interlinked through transformations and queries, make it challenging to determine which data is essential and which can be discarded.

What Can You Do About This Risk?

• Employ field-level data lineage tools to trace and understand data dependencies and transformations, helping identify what is crucial to migrate.
• Consistently evaluate data health metrics to ensure the migration includes only high-quality and pertinent data.
• To streamline the process and avoid unnecessary transfers, focus on migrating data that is actively used and valuable for the new environment.
• Identify and remove duplicate or obsolete data to reduce clutter and improve system efficiency in the cloud.

20. Impact on Operational Productivity

Once migration is complete, your IT team must manage ongoing operations. It includes maintaining tools, applying patches, and ensuring productivity. These responsibilities can become overwhelming for smaller companies, making effective management crucial to mitigate cloud migration risks.

How Can You Mitigate This Cloud Migration Risk?

• Expertly manage maintenance, optimization, and security.
• Ensure robust protection against cyber threats.
• Access dedicated tech support and comprehensive cloud management.
• Optimize operations to enhance efficiency and cut costs.
• Focus on business growth while ensuring smooth, reliable performance.

Conclusion

Frequently Asked Questions (FAQs)

What are the risks of cloud vendor lock-in?

Cloud vendor lock-in can restrict flexibility and complicate the process of switching providers or migrating data back to on-premises systems.

What are the risks of inadequate cloud resource management?

Inadequate resource management can result in over-provisioning, underutilization, and elevated costs.

How can inadequate testing affect cloud migration?

Lack of thorough testing can cause unexpected issues, adversely affecting application performance and user experience after migration.