Cloud computing is the technology that is digitally enhancing and strengthening business capabilities by eliminating the reliance on internal computing infrastructure for organizations to store and access data online. Businesses experts and influencers are encouraging the adoption of the cloud to leverage its numerous benefits:
- Scalability
- Fast Project Turnaround
- Minimal capital expense
- Enormous Flexibility
- Customization
Although cloud computing may be a cost-effective method for businesses to grow and develop, it’s not risk-free. Let’s quickly consider some common cloud computing mistakes people make and how you can avoid them.
Top Cloud Computing Mistakes to avoid and Increase Growth
Migrating Work to the Cloud Without Cause
As odd as it sounds, migrating to the cloud for no reason is an avoidable mistake still made by many people. Cloud computing is enabling businesses to handle tasks more efficiently. Still, that does not provide a reason to fully migrate and run all your business operations using the cloud.
Don’t migrate your business to the cloud just because you want to. You should clearly define the purpose and process of your migration should your organization consider adopting the cloud into its infrastructure. Evaluate the costs and benefits of shifting your data, workloads, and processes into a cloud environment.
Poor Projection of Cloud Migration Costs
Cloud migration can be quite expensive. Thus, before you decide to migrate to the cloud, it’s essential to evaluate the overall financial cost. Even if the investment may be worth it, you still might run into some unexpected spending during the migration period.
You will want to factor in the costs of cloud migration and the cost of downtime throughout the migration process.
Overlooking The Importance of Service Level Agreements
Service Level Agreements protect both the client and the consumer by highlighting guidelines for cloud service expectations, defined by the Cloud Standards Customer Council. The Council regulates and advises on the steps to follow when evaluating cloud service agreements, including:
- Assessing security and privacy extensions
- Assigning specific roles and responsibilities
- Outlining schemes for disaster recovery
- Outlining the exit process
The Misconception of Cloud Vendor Lock-In Costs
Upon agreeing with your provider regarding the service level agreements, you must also review and comprehend the vendor lock-in costs included in a contract.
What are they? Vendor lock-in is simply a service delivery technique assuring your dependence on the vendor services as a customer. Vendors achieve this by developing platform-dependent IT solutions with proprietary software applications that run exclusively or collaboratively with vendors’ third-party partners.
Overall, the high switching costs between vendors get dented, and customers remain reluctant or incapable of switching to another vendor. Remember to discuss possible cloud lock-in costs as you review your cloud provider.
Migrating Your Data in a Bundle
You will likely mess up one or two things when migrating your data into the cloud for the first time. With this predictable occurrence, you and your business must plan the process of migrating to the cloud. The process is more effective when implemented in phases. Begin with non-essential test data, and then when that’s successful, you can move the business-critical data.
This approach will ensure that you don’t carelessly put critical data at risk.
Forgetting About Cloud Security
Make securing your data a top priority. The last thing you want to do is ignore cloud security. Moreover, you can’t proceed with the assumption that the cloud environment you’re migrating to is secure by default.
The cloud has unlimited capacity to store loads of applications and harbors sensitive information in bulk. An excellent method to ensure data protection is encryption. Just be sure to protect your encryption keys.
Not Understanding Shared Cloud Responsibility
Although your service provider maintains your cloud environment and keeps it secure, you, as the user, must ensure you navigate the cloud environment safely. The specific responsibilities to uphold for both you and your service provider get outlined in your Service Level Agreement.
Carefully examine the service level agreements and select clauses that will help you uphold your responsibilities.
Not Implementing Pilot Projects
Successful cloud migration happens in stages. Thus, you must run a pilot project before your official move. Doing this will alert you to any issue and avoid data loss.
Although running a pilot may be costly, it’s not as expensive as data loss and corruption.
For instance, user adoption remains amongst the most significant challenges faced during initial cloud deployment. Pilot deployment processes will help you identify and overcome unprecedented challenges within a controlled environment, with minimal consequences.
Assuming Advanced Implementation of Security Precautions
Cybersecurity risks and breaches are real and avoiding such must remain a top priority for you. You must carefully consider the layers of security that are in place when picking a service provider. Also, you must ensure that your cloud platform gets risk assessments regularly.
Forgetting to Integrate Backup and Archiving requisites with Cloud Services
Furthermore, you must avoid assuming that the backup processes included in the cloud service package coincide with your industry’s regulatory requirements, especially regarding archiving messages.
Choosing Wrong Applications
This is an obvious mistake that generally seems avoidable. However, many people still fall victim to the misconceived capabilities and operational models of cloud applications. You must test any applications before migrating them to the cloud and ensure that workflow is smooth.
Be sure to determine if an app is cloud-suitable, accessible, has an efficiently configurable database, and smooth inter-app interactions.
