Migrating workloads to the public cloud is taking most enterprise IT organization’s time these days. Although analyst predictions vary, I would say we’re at about 20 percent migrated in the Global 2000, including PaaS, IaaS, and SaaS.
Common mistakes are beginning to emerge in these cloud migrations. Here are the top three mistskes I’m seeing—and they are easily avoidable if you know what to watch for.
Cloud migration mistake No. 1: Doing pure “lift and shift”
“Lift and shift,” simply put, is the process of moving code and data to a platform analog in the public cloud, typically making little or no modifications. While this approach saves time and money, at least at first, it may not get you to where you need to go because cloud-based applications need to have some cloud-native localization. You need this localization to use the public cloud platform in optimal ways, taking advantage of native features to reduce operational cost and increase performance.
The path here is easy to predict: Enterprises will move workloads to the cloud using a “lift and shift” approach, then in a year or two will have to go back in and modify (or refactor) the applications to use cloud-native features once they see the cost of hosting nonnative apps. In the meantime, the application is 30 to 40 percent less efficient.
