When migrating to the cloud many things needs to be considered before the migration begins and even if the migration is running or nearly done. The cloud develops pretty fast which does not only provide benefits.

What are your goals?

Before you migrate to the cloud, take a moment to really consider what goals you want to achieve by migrating to the cloud. What services do you want to migrate to the cloud? Which cloud offers the best portfolio to meet my goals? You can probably achieve your goals with any cloud on the market, but to be honest, each cloud provider has its own focus, and that should be taken into account before starting the migration. Is your on-premises world based on Microsoft and are you happy with it? Then you might want to look at Microsoft Azure and Microsoft 365. If you’re focused on Big Data and data analytics, Google Cloud Platform might offer some services that meet your needs.
To bring this topic to the point. There is no „perfect“ cloud offering. No „one size fits all.“ It really depends on what you’re looking for. So take a step back, examine what you want to achieve, and choose your cloud provider based on that.

It’s easy to save costs when migrating to the cloud, right? RIGHT?

Cloud service providers try to lure you with the information that maintaining your local world is very expensive and that you will save a lot of costs by migrating to their cloud services. But it’s not that simple. If you don’t plan for the migration, your costs may increase compared to your on-premises world. There are some differences when you compare the on-premise world and the cloud world. And these differences need to be taken into account when migrating and developing new services. Only by taking advantage of the cloud, such as auto-scaling and spot instances, to name a few, can you save some money.
And on your costing. Don’t forget that you’ll have to pay for storage used and sometimes network traffic sent to devices outside the cloud platform. If you forget that, you could be in for a rude awakening.

It’s easy to become dependent on the provider

Providers offer very nice services that can be very helpful and may offer exactly what you were looking for. But if you use a service that is only provided by a single cloud provider, you have to consider that you become dependent on that provider. What do you do if the provider drops that service from its portfolio? What do you do if the provider increases the cost of using that portfolio? What do you do if the provider leaves the market?
You should plan for these scenarios. Even if you don’t think they will occur. It’s better to be safe than sorry. Invest some time in your exit strategy and exit plan.

Is one cloud enough?

This topic is along the same lines as the previous one. You probably don’t want to be dependent on a single provider if you have moved your business-critical services to the cloud. What happens if the cloud provider goes down? That’s why you should consider – but only at a later stage – working in multi-cloud environments, where your primary site is in one cloud and your backup or disaster recovery site is in another – and perhaps a third if you want. This makes you much more flexible and less dependent on the availability of a single cloud provider. If one provider is unavailable, you simply use the other. Sounds simple, right? But it takes a lot of nous to design such architectures to be reliable and cost-effective.

How can you handle data privacy concerns?

Even though Microsoft states that its cloud offering is compliant with the German DSGVO and the European GDPR (General Data Protection Regulation) – see https://gdpr.eu/ for more information – there is the US Cloud Act. Microsoft offers a dashboard that shows how many requests have been processed for specific countries. This dashboard can be found at the following link: https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/corporate-responsibility/law-enforcement-requests-report. These things always need to be considered before and while migrating services to the cloud or using services from the cloud.
And to be honest… this doesn’t just apply to Microsoft. Other companies are subject to these regulations as well. You may want to consider this before migrating data to the cloud.

Haven’t talked about security yet…

Cloud providers often offer numerous security tools that can be used to protect the cloud platform and all data stored in the cloud. But as always, they must be implemented, configured, maintained and paid for. Since you’re probably strapped for cash and „certainly can’t sell more,“ you probably don’t want to deploy all the security measures that are out there, but only the ones that will help you the most. It’s not always so obvious which of the tools are the best fit for your business and absolutely need to be configured, and which are more „nice to have.“ It’s best to ask someone with experience who has not only read about the pros and cons of each tool, but has also configured them more than once. You can probably find some experts on the internet if you just search for them :-). Of course, as always, you can also do it yourself with good old „learning by doing“, but that may have some disadvantages that you can probably imagine.

And many many more

After reading all of this, you may already know that this is just the tip of the iceberg and that there are many more things to consider. I will probably address some of them in the next posts here. So stay tuned 😉

There are many considerations that should be made before and during migration to the cloud, but the cloud can also bring many benefits. Some of these are described in my other blog post, which you can find here . If you’d like to chat about the opportunities and potential risks of cloud migration, don’t hesitate to contact me. I look forward to talking with you 🙂