Mitigating Cloud Migration Missteps

Jonathan LaCour
Mission

Though the cloud may seem ubiquitous at this point, not everyone has made the move. The many challenges with migration give some organizations pause. More than half of migration projects fail due to hidden complexities and misaligned goals. However, if you're aware of the potential setbacks going into your migration process, you can prevent those pitfalls, resulting in more successful transformation with less friction.

Though migrating to the cloud offers myriad advantages over staying on-prem, there are some potential obstacles to be aware of. With thoughtful preparation and strategic implementation, you can navigate these hurdles to execute a seamless migration that makes the most out of your cloud investment. I've outlined some of the most common challenges below, as well as strategies for overcoming them.

Failing to plan = planning to fail

It's a cliche, but it's true. To properly prepare for the transition, it's critical that you have a strong understanding of what your infrastructure will look like before and after the migration, including dependencies, performance characteristics, and required operational changes. Having a plan in place will not only minimize risk, it will enable you to handle your migration with confidence.

Curtailing costs

Without sufficient oversight, cloud migration can bust budgets. Before embarking on your migration, perform analysis, and estimate your post-migration costs. Deploy tooling to track and monitor costs and have a process to react to unexpected spikes. With the right planning, tooling, and governance, you will be able to predict, report on, and control your costs.

Ensuring security

Transitioning from an on-prem workload to the public cloud represents a significant paradigm shift. Limiting risk, preventing breaches, and enabling rapid incident response will still be your primary goals, but the tactics to achieve these goals will be different. As part of your migration planning, implement robust security processes, like data encryption, multi-factor authentication and routine security assessments, to safeguard information during the transition and into the future.

Maintaining compliance

Migrating to the cloud doesn't change regulatory requirements and legal standards. Maintain compliance by thoroughly understanding applicable regulations like GDPR or HIPAA and partnering with cloud vendors to satisfy these requirements.

Deterring downtime

Migrating production workloads inherently creates risk. Define your availability goals in advance, planning carefully for a phased transition. Understand your customer and stakeholder commitments, and ensure that you have the right process and tooling in place to ensure that you meet them.

Championing organizational adoption

Change resistance often deters adoption, but with the right plan, you can proactively prevent frustrations. To get everyone on board, involve stakeholders early on, ensure everyone has the training to succeed, and maintain transparency around the importance and benefits of migration.

Choosing and vetting vendors

Selecting the right cloud service provider is critical for preventing problems down the line. When vetting vendors, keep scalability, security, compliance, and cost top of mind. Making sure their services align with your business needs now will help facilitate future-proofed success.

Staying aware of what challenges may arise will help you proactively work toward preventing them from happening at all. With these potential setbacks, as well as strategies for solving them, in mind, you can help ensure that your migration process runs as smoothly as it can.

Cloud migration goes beyond just a technical change. It's the next step in complete digital transformation. This evolution allows your organization to nurture and encourage innovation, expand capabilities, and stay relevant in the always-accelerating business environment. With strategic migration plans in place and an awareness of common stumbling blocks to avoid, you're opening the door to enhanced operational efficiency, stronger data protections, and business development that drives long-term growth.

Jonathan LaCour is CTO of Mission

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Mitigating Cloud Migration Missteps

Jonathan LaCour
Mission

Though the cloud may seem ubiquitous at this point, not everyone has made the move. The many challenges with migration give some organizations pause. More than half of migration projects fail due to hidden complexities and misaligned goals. However, if you're aware of the potential setbacks going into your migration process, you can prevent those pitfalls, resulting in more successful transformation with less friction.

Though migrating to the cloud offers myriad advantages over staying on-prem, there are some potential obstacles to be aware of. With thoughtful preparation and strategic implementation, you can navigate these hurdles to execute a seamless migration that makes the most out of your cloud investment. I've outlined some of the most common challenges below, as well as strategies for overcoming them.

Failing to plan = planning to fail

It's a cliche, but it's true. To properly prepare for the transition, it's critical that you have a strong understanding of what your infrastructure will look like before and after the migration, including dependencies, performance characteristics, and required operational changes. Having a plan in place will not only minimize risk, it will enable you to handle your migration with confidence.

Curtailing costs

Without sufficient oversight, cloud migration can bust budgets. Before embarking on your migration, perform analysis, and estimate your post-migration costs. Deploy tooling to track and monitor costs and have a process to react to unexpected spikes. With the right planning, tooling, and governance, you will be able to predict, report on, and control your costs.

Ensuring security

Transitioning from an on-prem workload to the public cloud represents a significant paradigm shift. Limiting risk, preventing breaches, and enabling rapid incident response will still be your primary goals, but the tactics to achieve these goals will be different. As part of your migration planning, implement robust security processes, like data encryption, multi-factor authentication and routine security assessments, to safeguard information during the transition and into the future.

Maintaining compliance

Migrating to the cloud doesn't change regulatory requirements and legal standards. Maintain compliance by thoroughly understanding applicable regulations like GDPR or HIPAA and partnering with cloud vendors to satisfy these requirements.

Deterring downtime

Migrating production workloads inherently creates risk. Define your availability goals in advance, planning carefully for a phased transition. Understand your customer and stakeholder commitments, and ensure that you have the right process and tooling in place to ensure that you meet them.

Championing organizational adoption

Change resistance often deters adoption, but with the right plan, you can proactively prevent frustrations. To get everyone on board, involve stakeholders early on, ensure everyone has the training to succeed, and maintain transparency around the importance and benefits of migration.

Choosing and vetting vendors

Selecting the right cloud service provider is critical for preventing problems down the line. When vetting vendors, keep scalability, security, compliance, and cost top of mind. Making sure their services align with your business needs now will help facilitate future-proofed success.

Staying aware of what challenges may arise will help you proactively work toward preventing them from happening at all. With these potential setbacks, as well as strategies for solving them, in mind, you can help ensure that your migration process runs as smoothly as it can.

Cloud migration goes beyond just a technical change. It's the next step in complete digital transformation. This evolution allows your organization to nurture and encourage innovation, expand capabilities, and stay relevant in the always-accelerating business environment. With strategic migration plans in place and an awareness of common stumbling blocks to avoid, you're opening the door to enhanced operational efficiency, stronger data protections, and business development that drives long-term growth.

Jonathan LaCour is CTO of Mission

Related Links

Hot Topics

The Latest

Manufacturing Organizations Doubled AI Investment Yet Only 37% Fully Prepared to Operationalize AI

While 87% of manufacturing leaders and technical specialists report that ROI from their AIOps initiatives has met or exceeded expectations, only 37% say they are fully prepared to operationalize AI at scale, according to The Future of IT Operations in the AI Era, a report from Riverbed ...

Optimizing Decisions with Edge-First Cognitive Intelligence

Many organizations rely on cloud-first architectures to aggregate, analyze, and act on their operational data ... However, not all environments are conducive to cloud-first architectures ... There are limitations to cloud-first architectures that render them ineffective in mission-critical situations where responsiveness, cost control, and data sovereignty are non-negotiable; these limitations include ...

The New Perimeter Is the User: Why Identity Is the Real Network Edge

For years, cybersecurity was built around a simple assumption: protect the physical network and trust everything inside it. That model made sense when employees worked in offices, applications lived in data centers, and devices rarely left the building. Today's reality is fluid: people work from everywhere, applications run across multiple clouds, and AI-driven agents are beginning to act on behalf of users. But while the old perimeter dissolved, a new one quietly emerged ...

When AI Infrastructure Stops Behaving Like Infrastructure

For years, infrastructure teams have treated compute as a relatively stable input. Capacity was provisioned, costs were forecasted, and performance expectations were set based on the assumption that identical resources behaved identically. That mental model is starting to break down. AI infrastructure is no longer behaving like static cloud capacity. It is increasingly behaving like a market ...

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Resilience can no longer be defined by how quickly an organization recovers from an incident or disruption. The effectiveness of any resilience strategy is dependent on its ability to anticipate change, operate under continuous stress, and adapt confidently amid uncertainty ...

Mobile Users Expect Perfection in 2026

Mobile users are less tolerant of app instability than ever before. According to a new report from Luciq, No Margin for Error: What Mobile Users Expect and What Mobile Leaders Must Deliver in 2026, even minor performance issues now result in immediate abandonment, lost purchases, and long-term brand impact ...

AI Confidence Is High. Readiness Is Not. What the Data Tells Us - and Why It Matters

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AI systems are still prone to hallucinations and misjudgments ... To build the trust needed for adoption, AI must be paired with human-in-the-loop (HITL) oversight, or checkpoints where humans verify, guide, and decide what actions are taken. The balance between autonomy and accountability is what will allow AI to deliver on its promise without sacrificing human trust ...

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