9 Cloud Implementation Challenges and Strategies for Success

Your company is growing, but you see bottlenecks. Data inefficiencies and latencies are appearing that can directly affect your bottom line. You need to change how you do business.

You realize you need to move to the cloud.

Moving to the cloud can seem challenging.

Top Common Challenges of Cloud Implementation

Virtixit frameworks help customers identify cloud adoption objectives and activities that will help launch their journey toward the cloud. We will present nine Cloud Implementation challenges that can happen. We also offer strategies for each of those challenges.

What Disaster Recovery Can Mean to Your Business

Problem:

Disasters can come from anywhere and at any time. Data recovery and failover systems are required if a massive data happens.

Solution:

Determine the extent of recovery needed for your company. A solution for one business may not be the right fit for yours. Be aware of the cost, SLA or any security or compliance requirements.

Pick a provider with experience to help you with your recovery plan. They should work within your budget to keep your organization safe. They should offer Disaster Recovery as a Service (DRaaS) to work with your company’s IT continuity plan.

What to Do When Your Database and Big Data Get Too Big

Problem:

Data is the blood of your organization. It can be used to identify causes of failures. It can also help you understand the potential of data-driven marketing and improve customer engagement. This leads to customer loyalty. Your business survives because of data.

Your challenges to store, transport, process, mine and serve the data may block the continued growth of your organization. There are multiple cloud options to consider, Public, Hybrid, or Private Cloud based solutions.

Traditionally, large amounts of data would require adding physical on location servers. This would require a capital expense. There would be a need for more processing power and storage space.

Solution:

Moving to the cloud allows your company to scale up or down. The scaling can be done quickly and efficiently. It will all be dependent on your unique data requirements.

Find a provider that has geo-diverse data centers that provide the ability to scale. It will push your processing and storage beyond current limits only when you need them.

Their portfolio should give efficient, scalable and cost-effective database and big data solutions.

Complete control and access to your data is a must. It should be stored in a secure and flexible environment.

What Are The Practices For Cloud Migration?

Problem:

Migrating to the cloud does not have to be complicated. But, do not overlook the details.

Solution:

There are proven methods of cloud migration. It takes an experienced and knowledgeable team to execute them flawlessly. These experts quickly handle unexpected challenges when they arise.

Moving to the cloud should be painless.

Regulations Interfere With Your Operations?

Problem:

Fugue surveyed over 300 IT operations professionals, executives, and developers. 39% or those surveyed believe cloud security and compliance issues are slowing them down.

44% said they are working to overcome compliance and security issues for their organization.

Solution:

Your organization needs to be armed with tools focusing on identifying the key users and systems. Granular access control and a migration path that allows specific users and device access is needed.

The chosen platform should be HIPAA and PCI DSS compliant. They should have a long history of successful audits. You should not have to pay to have an audit done.

One aspect of your cloud implementation should be email archiving, which ensures that all email communications are securely stored and easily retrievable, aiding in compliance with HIPAA, SOX, GDPR etc. regulations. By adhering to email archiving regulations, your organization safeguards against data loss, ensures regulatory compliance, and facilitates efficient e-discovery processes.

The framework should help customers to improve their security architecture without compromise.

How to Achieve Integration with Existing Infrastructure

Problem:

A complete move to the cloud is not the right strategy for all companies.

Some operations and data should stay local. Your local and cloud data have to be integrated. This is the only way to experience cloud efficiencies.

Solution:

Integration should not be lost. Your data should be united no matter where it is hosted.

The platform you choose should give you full control of your cloud resources. The interface and API should be easy to use. JSON and XML formats should be made available.

Why Cloud Data Backup and Recovery Makes Sense

Problem:

Average yearly data growth of a business is 30-50%. This poses challenges for companies to manage their data backups. It can also increase the time to recover data.

Traditional backup and recovery technologies are prone to failure. They may not meet the speed expectations of today’s pace of business.

Solution:

Cloud data gives you access to your data anytime, anywhere. You will not have to walk around with a laptop or need to go back to the office to see your data.

The cloud backup service should be affordable. It should fit into your company’s backup strategy. Backups should be monitored and safeguard against costly failures.

What Can the Lack of High Availability Do to Your Business?

Problem:

A down system can impair a user’s experience. It can also translate into a loss of revenue. A survey was conducted by CA Technologies. They reported businesses could suffer an average loss of revenue between $55,000 to over $1,000,000 a year. These figures go from small companies to large enterprises.

Solution:

The cloud platform should feature a high level of system redundancy. This allows your services to fail over to a working instance. It should also provide a high level of security to ward off attacks.

Your provider should offer a carrier-diverse platform

Redundancy and proprietary DDoS mitigation throughout should be mandatory.

The services should watch over your network traffic and take action against attacks when they happen.

Making Ecommerce Work in the Cloud

Problem:

Securing your data in the cloud can be a significant problem. Especially when the data is created and processed in the cloud. Efficient and economic solutions are required to protect your data and programs from attack.

Solution:

Cloud technologies offer tools and mechanisms for data trustiness and integrity. They take the risk out of e-commerce applications.

The platform you choose should provide nodes around the globe. These nodes have to be fast, reliable and secure. The nodes ought to be designed to keep your company available, strong, safe, and buyers connected. They perform even during traffic spikes.

Platforms should be in full compliance with SSAE 16 and PCI DSS standards.

Staff Embracing the Move to the Cloud

Problem:

A resistant IT culture may make the transition to the cloud difficult. This could cause the whole project to fail.

Your employees could be concerned about their roles changing. They could also be concerned that there will be a cut in staff.

They could disrupt the move while the plan is being executed.

Solution:

Changes bring pain. Your employees should be informed that cloud automation can free up their time for higher level tasks. They will have more time to follow the career path they want. Freedom can lead to more opportunities to move within the company.

The provider should allow you to leverage a highly skilled technical staff.

Your IT teams can focus on the things that drive your business. Your employees should spend their energy on tasks that directly improve the bottom line.

Consider Bare-Metal Cloud Solutions

Problem:

Public cloud environments host multiple Virtual Machines(VM) on the same server. This can cause the VMs to fight for resources.

Solution:

Bare-Metal cloud removes the worry about sharing the server with other VMs. Your company would be the sole tenant. It is ideal for workloads that cannot tolerate data latency.

Your provider should take care of the day-to-day monitoring of systems. This leaves your IT team to concentrate on improving your business.

451 Research predicts by the end of 2018, 68% of companies will operate in multi-cloud environments. Cloud migration is an inevitable step in the evolution of your business.

In closing

Cloud Implementation challenges can be overcome with careful planning and consideration.

Hopefully this guide addressed many of your concerns about moving your business data to the cloud. 

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