In the current technology market, the public cloud is recognized as the safest and most efficient way to streamline business operations and improve ROI. When the process of cloud adoption takes place, this involves major changes for a business. Opting for a cloud vendor will have a huge technical impact on your team. Rather than losing time and staff or reskilling employees, you might consider passing the responsibility to experts with the cloud knowledge to develop and evolve your application stack, thus ensuring the continuity of your app within a brand new tech-savvy environment.

Avoid These 6 Common Mistakes for Cloud Adoption

Be mindful of one fact: cloud adoption is not an effortless endeavor. It’s hardly a trouble-free journey. There are many challenges on that road. Before kicking off, you need to find the biggest priorities for your business. To ensure a strong cloud strategy is possible, you can give yourself a head start by avoiding the following 6 mistakes:

1. Disregarding Powerful Tooling, Especially Docker

2. Making Sudden and Wrong Decisions

3. Neglecting Governance and Security

4. Not Expecting Failure

5. Thinking it is a Simple and Easy Process

6. Over-burdening Your Under-resourced IT Staff

1. Disregarding Powerful Tooling, Especially Docker and Terraform

Don’t make the mistake of ignoring these tools. Terraform has been a mainstay of cloud deployments for years supplying essential building blocks for cloud deployments. Docker is also instrumental for cloud-related development projects. As opposed to VMs (Virtual Machine), using Docker means you do not have to set up clean environments and then just hope to avoid potential conflicts. Docker reduces or removes the chances of any conflicts. Make sure you dig into all the biggest benefits of Docker before handling complex cloud-based development.

2. Making Sudden and Wrong Decisions

Migration from legacy systems to the cloud can be painful to a business, especially if wrong decisions are made. The key thing is to keep the specific nature of your business in the crosshairs. When migrating applications and data, enterprises get too eager. They try to kick things into high gear straight away. This leads to too many moving parts and not enough time to recover from mistakes. As a result, your massive migration project can collapse easily.

3. Neglecting Governance and Security

Switching to the cloud doesn’t mean you should forget or minimize security, compliance, and governance. Security risks are like the on-premise environments, but also different that they can involve risks like hijacked of accounts, exposed public services, and so on. Sometimes a business may assume that governance and security is handled for them, or that it is the same as on-premise. Whilst it’s true that Amazon, Google and Microsoft cloud platforms are far more secure and supply more governance than what could be obtained on-premise, their vast range of tooling needs correct implementation.

4. Not Expecting Failure

There is a golden rule in cloud architecture: design for failure. Avoid getting too confident. You need to think about incorporating safety nets, recovery strategies that are built into the design right from the get-go. So, if the entire cloud set up experiences an outage, these precautions will ensure minimal harm and best output.

5. Thinking it is a Simple and Easy Process

Cloud adoption within a larger, complex business, with mission critical processes, is not a walk in the park. It is not just a technology initiative. You must think about people and processes. Furthermore, different parts of the business may have diverse strategies, decisions, and business goals to consider during a cloud migration. We advocate for sufficient planning and business strategy ahead of time, with clear stakeholder buy-in and ongoing management.

6. Over-burdening Your Under-resourced IT Staff

It is known for tech staff to be under pressure with day-to-day business. They commonly do not have the ability to undertake large transformational projects, such as cloud adoption. Similarly, cloud adoption often requires significant upskilling/training of the existing IT staff to undertake complex cloud infrastructure. Either of these can create a great burden on your team. So, how do you cut the risks involved with the acceleration of cloud adoption? One answer is to engage with cloud experts to bring the best practices and design patters into your team quicker. This will be more efficient. It will also allow the internal staff to transition more smoothly, whilst still focusing on your core business operations.

Download interview with our Cloud Solutions Architect Jean-Luc Barrett