You no longer have an option; you must migrate to the cloud services as a business requirement. But many companies flail during the shift. Errors in the cloud migration process led to higher costs, longer periods of downtime, regulatory issues, and even the possible collapse of the business.

Whether your intention is for a full digital transformation or to take a hybrid approach, you don’t want to fall into common cloud migration pitfalls. We list the top 10 errors companies make when migrating to the cloud—and, of course, explain how you can confidently avoid every one of them.

Lack of a Clear Cloud Migration Strategy

One of the most common and costly cloud migration mistakes is simply jumping in without a solid plan. Most businesses consider migration as a purely technical move, but if not married up with business objectives, this lacks coordination, leading to fragmented efforts and wasted resources.

How to Avoid It:

Create a clear cloud migration plan that has:

  • Business objectives and KPIs
  • Application and data scope
  • Migration timeline and phases
  • Risk analysis and risk management
  • Duties and communication plan

The implementation of a cloud migration checklist is an efficient method for ensuring that nothing is missed during the process.

Insufficient Analysis of the Current IT Infrastructure

Failure to properly analyze your existing IT infrastructure can result in unmatched workloads, unnecessary services, and non-optimal operations. Some applications are legacy-bound or reliant on older software that cannot run on the cloud environments.

How to Avoid It:

Conduct an infrastructure audit to determine the following:

  • Which apps to rehost, re-platform or refactor
  • Technical debt and dependencies 
  • Performance baselines and regulatory requirements
  • A deep assessment forms the basis for a customized process to plan the cloud migration.

Neglecting Cloud Cost Optimization

Underestimating or mishandling costs is one of the most harmful errors frequently made during cloud migration. Cloud services are scalable — but left unchecked, they can easily scale toward sizable bills just as quickly.

How to Avoid It:

  • Include cloud cost optimization early on.
  • Tag resources to ensure better exposure
  • Enable auto-scaling and scheduling
  • Use reserved instances if applicable
  • Use your cloud provider’s billing dashboards

Cloud is not cheap automatically — instead, you need to monitor and optimize both.

Underestimation of Downtime and Migration Complexity

Too many businesses and service providers take shortcuts and think they can telnet/ssh and FTP migrate a data center to the cloud overnight. The truth is that inadequate preparation can result in significant downtime, data loss, user dissatisfaction, and financial cost.

How to Avoid It:

Apply best practices for cloud migration to:

  • zero (or low) down downtime migrations in mind
  • Implement rollback capabilities and backups
  • Practice in staging environments.
  • Establish achievable time-frames and methodology for user communication
  • Factor in the technical and human difficulties to avoid mayhem.

Security and Compliance Concerns

With cloud migration comes security, which is one of the biggest issues. Cloud-based environments have shared responsibilities models and, of course, compliance requirements. Ignoring these could result in data breaches or non-compliance penalties.

How to Avoid It:

  • Integrate security measures at each and every stage of your plan to migrate to the cloud.
  • It is imperative that each and every piece of data is encrypted not just while it is being transported but also while it is being stored.
  • Implement Identity and Access Management (IAM) controls
  • Audit cloud configuration for compliance (such as HIPAA, GDPR)
  • Leverage CSPM (Cloud Security Posture Management) tools instead.
  • The demands of compliance don’t go away in the cloud — they mutate.

Lack of Planning with Teams and Stakeholders

A cloud migration is more about people than it is about platforms. Without adequate training, your staff could misuse cloud tools, pose security threats or refuse to adopt new workflows.

How to Avoid It:

Prepare your people with:

  • Scenario-based learning on cloud service providers
  • Stakeholder Change management sessions
  • Developer and sysadmin labs and demos

Upskilling is crucial to moving to the cloud and avoiding cloud migration mistakes due to human error or resistance.

Migrating Without Testing

Skipping testing is blind flying. It creates the likelihood that you’ll launch and immediately have bad performance, a misconfigured service, or be at risk of losing your data.

How to Avoid It:

  • Make sure you test heavily before migration.
  • Performance and latency in the network
  • Consistency and integrity of the data
  • Response Times and Scalability of the Application
  • Security controls and access policies
  • Leverage sandbox environments to replicate environments in the real world.

Neglecting of governance and oversight

Clouds can get messy in a hurry — and that’s without governance. Resources are wasted on spreading out, going over budget, and breaking the law.

How to Avoid It:

According to the governance model, which includes:

  • Resource tagging policies
  • Budgeting and usage limits
  • Role-based access controls
  • The capability to monitor and provide alerts in near real-time

Services such as AWS CloudWatch, Azure Monitor or the Google Cloud Operations Suite can assist in this.

Selecting the Wrong Model or Provider for Cloud Services

Using the popularity of a cloud provider as your sole or primary selection criteria will result in vendor lock-in, performance bottlenecks and lost opportunities.

How to Avoid It:

  • Carefully consider your options.
  • Know the distinctions involving IaaS, PaaS, and SaaS
  • Evaluate cloud vendors based on performance, support, and compliance
  • Some organizations adopt a multi-cloud or hybrid-cloud approach for agility
  • Costs to long-term, and contract analysis
  • This decision is critical — take the long view.

No Optimization Plan

For a lot of organizations, the project is done once workloads are live in the cloud. That’s a mistake. Cloud environments can stop evolving or grow out of control if there’s no constant optimization.

How to Avoid It:

Add post-migration activities to your film migration checklist

  • Performance tuning
  • Security re-audits
  • Rightsizing and cost cutting
  • Architecture review for cloud-native improvements

Cloud maturity is a journey, not a place.

Final Thoughts

Cloud migration is an expedition, not a destination. Organizations should steer clear of these common cloud migration mistakes and follow a structured strategic approach in order to leverage all of the benefits the cloud has to offer.

Key Reminders: Successful Cloud Migration Tips

  • Utilize a solid cloud migration checklist
  • Design the cost optimization for the cloud
  • Don’t forget about training, testing and governance
  • Leverage lessons learned from cloud migration failures

Effective cloud migration includes deliberate planning of cloud infrastructure, stakeholder alignment, and ongoing improvement. By steering clear of these leading mistakes, you’ll achieve long-term success from your migration project.

Frequently Asked Questions (FAQ)

What is cloud migration and why does it matters?

Cloud migration is the process of moving data, applications and IT processes from in-house or managed data centers (on-premises) to a cloud-based infrastructure. It has such advantages as scalability, cost-effectiveness, improved performance and superior disaster recovery.

What are the greatest challenges in migrating to the cloud?

The principal obstacles to cloud migration are

  • Lack of a clear strategy
  • Compatibility issues
  • The issues of security and compliance parties Data security and compliance
  • Cost overruns
  • It’s considered a shortage of skills in cloud technology.

How can I prevent failure in cloud migration projects?

To prevent disaster, do the following:

  • Develop a comprehensive cloud migration plan
  • Evaluate your existing infrastructure
  • Train your teams
  • Leverage cloud migration best practices that work
  • Test well before publish

What is the average amount of time required for a cloud migration? 

Timeline varies as per project scope, data volume, complexity and business size. Minor migrations might require as little as a few weeks, while large enterprise migrations could take several months or longer.

What are some of the typical cloud migration mistakes to avoid?

The most frequent mistakes are

  • Rushing without planning
  • Underestimating costs
  • Ignoring security
  • Choosing the wrong provider
  • Skipping testing