By James Carnie, Mobilise CEO, looks at the common mistakes companies make when migrating to the cloud, and explains how to avoid them

Although cloud migration is already being adopted by many businesses across the UK, some organisations are still reluctant to make the switch.

However, cloud computing, done right, allows for greater cost control and agility within an organisation. It allows businesses to try out new services at little cost, removes capital expenses and ties IT usage more closely with business demand. It’s something businesses of all sizes can benefit from.

Cloud migration, in simple terms, is the process of moving an organisation’s data, applications and other business elements from a local server to a computing environment which is managed by a cloud provider like Amazon Web Services, Microsoft Azure and Google Cloud Platform.

By migrating applications and data to the cloud, organisations will reduce the deployment times of their services, improve IT security and backup services, simplify IT infrastructures, and provide a more flexible solution for all staff – as they will no longer need to be on-site to resolve IT issues.

Business continuity with cloud

When an organisation has a cloud system in place, it becomes much easier to build ‘self-healing’ systems and plan for business continuity events.

The coronavirus pandemic put the spotlight on many organisations last year, as office-based staff across the UK were told to work remotely and stay home. Cloud enabled businesses were able to quickly adapt to the large number of staff who started working remotely, putting them on the front foot ahead of those who weren’t. Employees at these cloud enabled organisations have been able to use their own mobile device, tablet or laptop to log-on to their virtual work environment, limiting disruption considerably.

As cloud computing allows employees to work from any location with internet access, it means work can still be completed at the same level as if they were sat behind their office desk. It provides greater flexibility for many employers as staff can access all their documents and data via a highly secure virtual environment, something that’s been more important than ever over the last year.

We know this works well in practice, as we recently supported the DVLA with successfully migrating its 5,000 employees, 600 servers and all public facing systems over to a cloud environment. Transitioning to this platform resulted not only in considerable savings and a four month return on investment, it also significantly improved the organisation’s IT services. Application delivery became more streamlined and all environments across its multiple platforms were consistent and able to rapidly recover in the event of a failure.

Watch out for cloud charlatans

Although migrating to the cloud comes with many benefits, if not implemented properly businesses could be faced with a number of challenges. Organisations that poorly execute their move to cloud computing may face major security issues, while the costs of the project can also spiral out of control, having the opposite effect it is supposed to have.

Employing a contractor to support with cloud migration is one of the most important steps of moving to the cloud. But as cloud technology is still relatively new, there are unfortunately a number of contractors out there who don’t have the right qualifications but will still work with an organisation to ‘help’ with the cloud migration – only to end up causing chaos.

So when you hire external help, always ask for a reference and CV, and double check to make sure they have relevant experience working on similar projects.

In addition, talk to other people in the IT industry to see what contractors they would recommend and reach out to cloud providers because they’ll be able to offer a list of accredited partners who could help.

Avoid doing half a job

The true benefit of cloud computing is the automation and optimisation of all services within an organisation. One of the easiest and cheapest ways to migrate to the cloud is by following a process known as the ‘lift and shift.’

Lift and shift is the start of the cloud migration journey as it simply takes the existing workload as-is and runs it like-for-like on a cloud platform. Organisations adopting this approach will move to the cloud faster, with a smaller amount of work and a reduced risk of any complications.

Migrating some applications and then stopping has been done before, but it’s important that businesses complete this process from start to finish to ensure they have a fully automated, self-healing and cost-effective platform in order to see the true benefits of being a cloud-enabled organisation.

Mobilise is a Swansea-based cloud enablement consultancy established in 2014. The company delivers enterprise-level development and cloud transformation using leading-edge technologies, and transforms IT systems and processes for large organisations. To find out more visit: https://www.mobilise.cloud/