Risks and Benefits of Cloud Migration

If your company is like other common businesses today, you already have at least one work related process that is running in the cloud but that doesn't mean that cloud migration is right for each business. While environments in the cloud are generally scalable, highly available and reliable, those won’t be the only considerations for you to come up with your decision. 

For companies that are considering their first cloud migration, there are a lot of factors that they need to take into account - from the risks and the benefits to the cloud migration services model and type that is right for the business. 

Benefits of Cloud Migration - There are many problems that moving your data, processes and other business information can solve. Here are some of the benefits of migrating your system in the cloud:

• Reduced Costs - another big benefit of moving to the cloud is the reduced cost organizations experience and organizations can achieve significant savings by migrating to the cloud especially in the long term. There are no upfront investments with the cloud, you don’t need to buy costly servers, office space to hold all this hardware. 

• Increased Collaboration - Nowadays, collaboration is equal to efficiency and competitiveness. There are many technologies that a company can use to leverage their collaboration and the cloud is one of them and because everything is accessible using the Internet, employees can work together in different states, cities or even countries. 

• Security - One of the misconceptions about the cloud is that it’s not secured while in reality, that could not be further from the truth. Cloud providers ensure their clients that they maintain the strictest security practices for them. 

Risks of Cloud Migration - While your specific business environment will determine the risks that apply to you and your business, there are some drawbacks associated with cloud migration and here are some of it:

• Data Loss - It is important to make sure that all your data is backed up, especially the files, processes or information that you will be migrating to the cloud. During the process of migrating, you may encounter some issues like incomplete, corrupt or missing files. 

• Lack of Visibility and Control - One of the top risks in cloud migration is visibility. It affected application and the network performance. If you rely on your own on-site data centers, you can take full control over your resources including networks, data centers and physical hosts but when switching to external cloud services, the responsibility for some of the policies moves to the cloud service providers depending on the type of service that you avail. As a result of that, the company lacks visibility in terms of public cloud workloads. 

• Latency Addition - Unwanted latency is an underestimated risk in migrating to the cloud. It can occur when you access databases, applications and services needed for your business in the cloud. Latency is very critical for e-commerce websites, video streaming solutions, IoT devices and cloud gaming platforms where customer experience is really crucial. If you have applications that require immediate action, delay in a few seconds can already pose as a serious damage to your business.