Five Overlooked Tips for Avoiding Cloud Migration Failure

By Robin Morrison, Managing Director and Michael Ryan, Head of Architecture

In a hurry to get to the cloud? Here’s what you need to keep in mind:

Cloud migrations often pose daunting technical challenges, but the work doesn’t end there. Lack of attention to organizational and political considerations can also lead to suboptimal outcomes or or worse — outright failures.

At Kenzan, we work with company leaders who are eager to forge ahead to the cloud. However, there are choices companies make that can cause a cloud migration to fail before it ever gets off the ground. Here are some tips we’ve learned along that way that will help you ensure that your cloud migration takes off.

To you, moving to the cloud means a bright future where enhanced organizational agility and superior quality let you win in the marketplace, free up money for new investments, and attract the best engineers in today’s tough labor market.

Unfortunately, not everyone will share your vision or your enthusiasm. Many will worry their day-to-day jobs will change or that they don’t have the skills and knowledge to handle what’s coming. Some will fear for their jobs and be tempted to slow walk or even sabotage your efforts. At the very least, cloud journeys transform the employee experience across the board, promising a radically different work environment for testers, developers, and managers. This can be jarring.

You can help make sure your vision becomes reality by having and communicating empathy for employees, finance leaders and other stakeholders. Take the time to understand their concerns so that you can address them upfront and sincerely.

For your vision to become a reality, you have to communicate it first. Communicate your vision for the cloud widely and often. Just as importantly, communicate in a way that helps everyone see how they can help to achieve — and benefit from — the cloud journey.

It’s crucial to back up your vision with concrete plans. Be armed with case studies and testimonials from engineers at other companies about how cloud migration has helped them learn new skills and improve their day-to-day work life. Honestly assess your team’s current skill sets, and lay out a detailed learning path for them. Identify the most tedious parts of their current workday and then show how cloud technology can eliminate them.

After these detailed training plans are developed, communicate them in multiple places. Discuss the training plans in All Hands meetings, and provide guidance on how managers can communicate the details in smaller team meetings and one-on-ones. Make sure to address how managers and employees can plan to sign up and participate in the training to make this feel real for everyone.

In their excitement, company leadership can sometimes exaggerate expectations of a fast return on investment. The cloud transformation may even have been sold to senior management as a “quick win” with little risk and massive financial gain. Everyone assumes there will be radical savings in going to the cloud. The public cloud providers themselves emphasize savings in their marketing materials. You can and should save costs — but to do so you must implement cloud computing best practices across the business.

Ensure your transformation lasts longer than a quarter or two by explaining to business stakeholders the true scope of additional change and work required. Also explain that there are many more benefits to a cloud migration than just saving money. The ability to rapidly pivot to meet changing customer demands, improved quality and uptime of existing workloads, the financial benefits of operating expenses vs capital expenses, and the opportunity to recruit top technical talent are all widely-experienced benefits of cloud migrations.

Some types of workloads provide more opportunities for savings than others. The cloud lets you increase capacity to meet times of peak demand and then scale down when demand lessens — this is where cost savings can be found. If a workload experiences constant load, then there are fewer opportunities for savings.

Successfully scaling up and down to meet changes in demand often require changes to an application’s architecture. We typically find that a microservice architecture is often appropriate in these circumstances.

Enable teams to move faster in the cloud by building and integrating DevSecOps into your cloud pipeline. DevSecOps is not a role. Rather, it is a set of practices built on a philosophy of integrating security practices within the DevOps process itself. “Zero trust” security principles are a highly recommended offshoot of DevSecOps.

IF you’re not Agile today, begin your Agile Transformation now.

Migrating to the cloud requires different processes than simply moving a data center to another location. You will not be able to exploit your new ability to deploy faster and improve time to market without also adopting an Agile workflow. Also, keep in mind that Agile methodologies require new training, processes, and transparency into work that may be just as much an object of uncertainty for employees as the cloud itself. So if you aren’t Agile already, start here!

Migrations benefit from having a solid and detailed plan, and most migrations follow a similar path. But in our experience, migration programs benefit from Scrum and other Agile methods. Cloud migrations have similar complexities compared to new software development — where seemingly simple applications become more complex, dependencies need to be managed, and close collaboration with business owners and end users is necessary. Most migrations experience frequent pivots and changes to the original plan. Constant focus on continuous improvement and supporting teams by removing impediments is as valuable to cloud migrations as it is to new software development.

Just like with wheels, there’s no need to reinvent the cloud journey on your own. A trusted cloud consultant can help guide you through the myriad people and process considerations of your cloud migration. Having an experienced consultant along on the journey will help you gain the most from your cloud investment and ensure you have the organizational-readiness needed to capitalize on your newfound agility and scalability.

Originally published at https://kenzanmedia.medium.com on April 6, 2021.

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