The coronavirus pandemic has magnified the importance of cloud-based technologies in major, life-altering ways and ushered in a new paradigm. Before COVID-19, experts projected the worldwide public cloud services market would jump by 17% this year, reaching $266.4 million. Software as a service is the largest segment within that market, but the second-largest infrastructure as a service claims the fastest growth rate.

A number of factors are driving businesses to choose the cloud as the standard for applications, data, and storage. They migrate to gain flexible computing power, to lower the cost of backup/recovery, or to turn capital expenses into operational costs. Beyond any single benefit, however, companies migrate to facilitate organisational change in ways that only the cloud can offer.

Take artificial intelligence as just one example. Companies that have already implemented AI saw an uptick in revenue, and 44% experienced a reduction in costs. Executives across industries want (and need) to use this technology effectively, and thats possible from a technical and logistical standpoint only if the technology runs out of the cloud. To put it simply, the cloud is where the future happens, meaning companies either migrate or get left behind.

Unfortunately, knowing where to go rarely makes the journey easier. In terms of cloud migration challenges, spinning down a monolithic legacy system can be an exhausting undertaking like demolishing a building brick by brick. Moving around data and abandoning traditions also raises concerns about security and compliance. Plus, changing any kind of enterprise IT requires a massive retraining effort and necessitates interrupting the normal workflow for extended periods. Make no mistake: Cloud migration isnt easy, even if it makes IT easier over the long run.

When companies fail to create a cloud migration plan, they rarely make it to the cloud on time, under budget, or with the results they expected. Given the speed and scale of whats involved, migrations can derail in countless ways if theyre not carefully organized in advance.

Cloud networking/infrastructure setup seems simple at first, for instance, but then developers need to build guardrails for usage while also finding and closing any vulnerabilities hackers could exploit. Balancing accessibility and security involves an endless barrage of difficult choices that are better to plan for in advance rather than try to work through on the fly.

Another common cloud migration challenge happens when product teams maintaining the applications to be migrated arent directly involved in the migration. Because these product teams lack experience with the underlying architecture, theyre not prepared to properly manage the tools moving forward (even though they have that responsibility). In this way, companies must strike another balancing act between migration specialists and product teams, ensuring that both parties are integrally involved without processes becoming inefficient something that only advanced planning can achieve.

Several elements characterise effective migrations, such as self-service learning, teams working autonomously, showcasing best practices, and crowdsourced assistance with the organisation. Each one of those pillars is a major undertaking, which emphasises why deep, detailed plans are so important. Granted, cloud migration strategies take time to prepare and involve complicated, difficult choices, but the effort you put into planning before the migration proves its worth the minute things start moving.

As you start to plan for the challenges of moving to the cloud, make sure youre thinking through each issue individually and in-depth.

Realistically, planning a cloud migration may be as hard as executing the plan itself. Thats why many companies partner with migration specialists to ensure theyre considering every contingency and meeting every benchmark. Partners with a shared purpose and concrete aims applied consistently in the organisation go a long way to turn good intentions into tangible outcomes. The best advice for cloud migration really applies to any journey dont set out without a guide and a map.

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Covid-19 has hastened cloud migration - but don't move without a plan - Cloud Tech