10 Common Cloud Data Migration Challenges and How To Overcome Them

Shifting to the cloud from on-premise has been an increasing trend among businesses these days. Surprisingly, Statista states that over 60% of corporate data is stored on the cloud, which might increase in the coming years.

This increasing reliance on the cloud is due to becoming more agile, adaptive, and competitive in this digital-first world. This level of digital transformation improves a business’s efficiency and scalability.

However, despite various benefits, the cloud data migration process has underlying challenges. Matt Barrington claims that half of the cloud transformations are failures due to cloud data migration challenges, including data loss, security, scalability, and more.

This process is not entirely tech-first. Instead, it requires a decent cloud migration strategy and the implementation of valid measures for a smooth transition. Hence, a business can partner with a cloud transformation services provider to maximize the migration benefits while minimizing the disruptions. 

This blog will help you understand some commonly prevailing cloud data migration challenges and guide you through some working solutions to overcome them. 

Ten Common Cloud Data Migration Challenges

On-premise to cloud offers various benefits, especially in cost and scalability. Indeed, it does, but the process of migration in cloud computing is stacked with several challenges due to complex processes or irrelevant strategies. Here are some of the commonly prevailing challenges that hinder cloud data migration: 

1. Unclear Cloud Data Migration Strategy

A clear plan of action is essential while performing this step. However, many organizations fail to prepare a working data migration roadmap. This happens when a team fails to assess the current IT infrastructure, does not have clear cloud transformation goals and objectives, and more. When the foundation is inadequate, it will impact the cloud data migration plan. 

2. Data Governance

This is one of the significant challenges in cloud data migration. While setting up the data in the cloud and aligning multiple teams, tracking who owns a particular information set might be challenging. 

This creates ambiguity and challenges in accountability and responsibility for data handling. Also, some organizations fail to ensure that their data governance complies with relevant regulations like HIPAA or GDPR during and after migration. 

3. Compatibility With New Systems

We have seen various legacy systems that are not compatible with cloud environments. This is because of their age-old designs, technologies, and tools they utilize to deliver and store information. The ineffectiveness of age-old systems is one of the significant challenges for businesses looking to invest actively in cloud solutions. 

4. Data Security Challenge

Security is one of the prime and common challenges in cloud data migration. When migrating on-premise data to the cloud, the chances of vulnerabilities might increase, making sturdy measures essential.  Here are some of the key cloud migration data security challenges: 

• Data breaches can happen if the data is not encrypted during transit or at rest. 
• Organizations do not have the same visibility in the cloud as they do with an on-premise setup, making it difficult to monitor malicious practices. 
• Not adequately monitoring the access can lead to welcoming potential insider threats.
• Not having proper network security measures, like a firewall and an intrusion detection system, can hinder cloud computing security. 

These are some data security challenges a business focusing on cloud-specific transition faces. 

5. Data Loss

Cloud data migration requires a precision-oriented approach. Failure can lead to data loss, caused by three main factors: inaccurate transfer, system incompatibilities, and human error. Misplacing important business data while performing cloud data migration is miserable.  

6. Bandwidth and Network Limitations

This is one of the issues that you can face during cloud data migration. Limited speed and slow network speed can potentially disrupt the data-transferring process. This is not a process where ten or twenty data sets are uploaded; in fact, large volumes of data are transferred to the cloud, and insufficient bandwidth can make the process slower and increase latency. This ultimately hinders the overall data migration to the cloud. 

7. Cost Management

Sometimes, a business fails to understand that there may be hidden costs associated with migrating data to the cloud.  Hidden expenses related to storage, esters, or labor can be one of the significant cloud data migration challenges. Also, the upfront costs of shifting to the cloud can overrun a company’s specific budget. 

8. Skill Gap

Migrating data to the cloud requires specific skills and hands-on experience. Most cloud data migration projects fail due to skill-specific inefficiencies. Technical proficiency includes strong database management, knowledge of cloud platforms (AWS, GCP, Azure), and experience with extraction, transformation, and loading. 

If a cloud migration services provider is missing any of these skills, it’s suggested that you look for the one that ticks every column of your requirements. 

9. Lower Performance After Migration

You might experience a slight decline in the performance of your cloud migration solutions. This might be because of network latency (as with apps that require real-time access to show results, which can be negatively impacted by network latency). Also, inefficient resource utilization can lead to low-performance applications. 

10. Testing Challenges

Post-migration testing is crucial to ensure everything is working aptly. However, this also presents some of the primary cloud data migration challenges that one must not overlook, including:

• Creating a mirror-like environment in the cloud can be challenging due to limited custom configurations and integrated services
• Checking data integrity can be difficult because it can either be corrupted or lost during the cloud data migration process
• Ensuring that various services that the cloud offers integrate and perform well can create difficulties in the post-testing process

These are some of the cloud data migration testing challenges that you can face when transforming your on-premise data to a cloud platform. 

Why is Meeting Cloud Migration Challenges Vital?

Challenges are the obstacles that impact an organization’s path to success. They must come, especially in cloud migration. It is vital to overcome them to leverage the complete benefits of cloud computing. Here is how it is essential for a business to meet the challenges of cloud migration: 

Business Continuity

Cloud data migration challenges can hamper the growth of a business in the short and long run. An effective migration plan is essential to overcome them. This will aid a business in performing a smoother transition to the cloud by minimizing disruptions. Effectively addressing these challenges can help overcome potential issues by maintaining service availability and performance, translating to business continuity. 

Controlling Financial Outcomes

Hidden costs can be one of the headaches in your cloud migration process. These must be met strategically. You must be well-prepared about them, like egress fees, licensing costs, and more. However, sometimes, these occur in an unanticipated way, leading to an inflation of an organization’s budget by 30-40%. 

Netflix is one of the prime examples whose early cloud migration overspend led to auto-scaling, saving them millions annually. However, the subtle nuance lies in Netflix’s strategy. 

Enabling Scalability 

Cloud data migration is a step ahead of on-premise storage. Those actively adopting it are well aware of the common cloud data migration challenges, and those who have overcome them have future-proofed their presence. Overcoming age-old compatibility issues (legacy systems) can help a business welcome future technologies like AI, ML, and more. 

Coca-Cola’s migration from legacy ERP to AWS enabled AI-focused supply chain forecasting. 

Maintaining Competitiveness

The cloud transformation will help you stay aligned with the competition. However, this will only be fruitful if you opt for services from a cloud computing company. The skilled team will perform efficient migration by optimizing the bandwidth. This will help you include new features in your web or mobile application quickly before your competition does. 

Airbnb is one of the leading examples of apt cloud adoption. It helps them reduce their deployment cycle from weeks to months. This improved their competitiveness by accelerating their global expansion ratio. 

Strategic Business Transformation 

Meeting cloud data migration challenges becomes crucial for a business to welcome innovation, agility, and better performance. It lays a strong foundation and allows organizations to adopt modern technologies or methodologies. For instance, a large health-specific institute can adopt DevOps in healthcare operations for better collaboration and operational efficiency. 

How to Overcome Cloud Data Migration Challenges? 

Every process has some sort of challenges, whether big or small. What sets one apart is how you respond to them. Cloud migration challenges are not new, and depending on specific needs, these might differ. However, you can overcome them by following the steps mentioned below:

Assess Your Requirements

The more you know about what you want, the better results you will achieve. You must be aware of your requirements before investing in cloud data migration. This will help you from the start to the end of this process. Create a comprehensive plan and document it by covering the quintessential, like:

• What do you want to migrate? 
• How do you perform the transition?
• Is there any specific data that requires transition or not?
• When do you want to relocate your data?
• What will be the migration order? 

This will help you build a detailed assessment plan of your requirements by understanding specific datasets and applications. 

Pick the Right Cloud Data Migration Strategy

Once you are aware of your requirements, the next step is to select the right cloud migration strategy to suit your needs precisely. Three major strategies to follow include:

Re-hosting

This is the fastest and simplest approach, including one that lifts on-premise data and shifts it directly to the cloud. If you want to quickly move your application to the cloud with minimal changes, this cloud data migration approach suits you. 

Re-platforming 

In this approach, you need to make some changes to the application before moving it to the cloud. It allows you to leverage cloud-specific benefits without rewriting the entire application. This hybrid approach can be good for you if you want to optimize performance by taking advantage of the cloud-specific features without investing heavily in development.

Re-factoring

Both cloud data migration strategies require extensive effort due to their complexity. However, this strategy is specifically helpful in leveraging the cloud’s most significant potential in terms of long-term benefits. This typically involves redesigning and rewriting applications to fully utilize cloud-native capabilities.  

Choosing one among them will be based on factors like timeline, budget, and your long-term goals. 

Data Cleansing

Common cloud data migration challenges include duplicate, irrelevant, incomplete, or inaccurate data. This can negatively impact your entire process. You must invest wisely in cleaning your data through several strategies like pre-migration data audit, removing duplicate data, and implementing a validation process to ensure correct/original data is to be added to the cloud.

Use Automation Tools and Services

Manual migration can take more time and effort. Instead, you can leverage specialized migration tools, like Azure Migrate or Google Cloud Migration, to help you automate the data migration process. The ETL (execution, transformation, and loading) process will be streamlined through these tools. For a better advantage, you can work with a cloud migration company for precision and effective results. 

Ensure Data Security 

Cloud migration data security is a challenge requiring a precision-oriented approach. You can overcome this by performing adequate encryption (both at rest and in transit), controlling who has access, utilizing correct security protocols, and meeting relevant industry compliance (GDPR, HIPAA, CPCC, and more). 

Monitor Performance

Executing data migration in cloud computing can sometimes degrade an application’s performance due to network latency. This can negatively impact the credibility of the services you provide. Hence, you must optimize the resources that lower the performance quality, conduct comprehensive testing, and continuously monitor to gain cloud benefits.  

How Does an Experienced Team Help Resolve Cloud Migration Challenges?

The above steps can help, but working with an experienced team will help you implement data migration best practices to ensure precision and perfection. All this is because of their proficiency and ability to handle different project requirements. 

1. Technical Proficiency

Their in-depth experience working on diverse cloud projects and detailed understanding of cloud-first platforms (AWS, Azure, GCP) will significantly benefit your project. They will help you select the right platform and guide you throughout the migration process by adopting the right strategy. 

2. Strategic Planning  

Based on your project goals, they will prepare a strategic plan of action that ensures your modernization to the cloud supports your overall objectives. This will be curated after thoroughly assessing your existing infrastructure, which outlines the data to identify risks, dependencies, and migration plans. 

3. Data Management

Experts will help you overcome one of the cloud data migration problems: ineffective data management. They ensure the integrity and consistency of your data throughout the migration process by minimizing the risk of loss or corruption. Also, aid in implementing the robust security measures to ensure data flow is secure throughout the process. 

4. Cybersecurity 

Assessing every aspect is crucial to ensuring the security of cloud solutions remains intact. An experienced cybersecurity team will follow a multifaceted approach that includes implementing strong authentication, encryption, and monitoring, and continuously assessing and improving the security posture of the cloud solution. 

5. In-depth Testing 

Cloud and DevOps service providers will help you perform in-depth quality engineering to ensure an error-free experience. They will conduct testing of every specific aspect, from functional testing to performance. Ensure you work with a highly experienced team to perform need-specific and thorough testing. 

6. Training Change Management

Working on on-premise solutions is different from working on the cloud, which requires staff training. Working with experienced cloud service providers will help train your IT staff on cloud technologies and best practices. Proper training and adequate documentation ensure a smooth transition. 

7. Post-Migration Support

Several technical or non-technical issues might appear after migration. A team that provides post-migration support can be highly beneficial here. Not only will they perform cloud data migration best practices but also provide ongoing support to ensure the smooth running of your solution. 

Ending Note 

Cloud data migration is gradually becoming vital, and 6 out of 10 businesses have actively adopted this. It might look lucrative, but the common cloud data migration challenges must appear and can dethrone your presence in the market. Some can be fixed by considering specific precision on time, while others require an expert’s assistance. A detailed plan of action will help you throughout the process. 

Leverage SparxIT’s Expertise for Successful Cloud Data Migration

Cloud migration challenges negatively impact the presence of your business. SparxIT will help you overcome them by applying a precision-perfect approach. We are experienced in resolving common to specific cloud data migration challenges. Our hands-on experience on cloud-specific projects, whether data migration or cloud native development, helps you perform seamless cloud transition. 

As an experienced cloud consulting company, we can help you choose the right migration strategy for your project, whether re-hosting or re-factoring. Our team effectively leverages Infrastructure-as-Code (IaC) tools to automate infrastructure provisioning and management. If your project requires the integration of AI, ML, IoT, Blockchain, or any specific technologies, we can help you integrate them by minimizing development disruption.

Our security-first approach ensures that we implement all the right measures to uplift the safety and privacy of your critical data during migration. Experience excellence in cloud data migration with SparxIT’s innovation-led, agile tech team.