The decision is cemented. You’re moving to the cloud.

And although it might feel like a relief (after all, the decision process has been long, and changing your old ways to dive into new technologies seems sexy), that fluffy feeling of ease will soon be gone.

Once a cloud migration is on the drawing board, challenges appear.

By the end of this page, you’ll have an idea about the most common challenges that we hear people struggle with, in a conventional cloud migration. And approaches to solve them. So you don’t have to take a whack-a-mole approach to your cloud transformation but can tackle these challenges in advance.

Here are the two overarching challenges that we hear our customers struggle with when they dive headfirst into a cloud migration:

This is the problem in short:

Insufficient information.

That’s it.

For most organizations, that’s the overarching issue:

Insufficient information about the digital estate.

Without the right information about your current IT, you can’t make informed decisions about your future IT.

If you lack insight into what systems and applications are critical and interdependent, it is difficult to make informed decisions about how to prioritize in the cloud migration process.

So how will you plan and prioritize your cloud transformation?

Guesswork?

Freestyle?

Roll the dice?

The reason that most organizations don’t have that information?

That they don’t know what systems are critical? Which applications are interdependent?

They’ve lost the overview of their IT.

Getting that overview of your IT back is key.

And it’s a lot more simple than it sounds.

Today, a good software service can provide you with a complete inventory mapping of your entire digital estate.

In no time.

Automatically, of course.

For your cloud transformation to be successful, it is important to truly understand your existing digital estate and the interdependencies within your digital landscape.

So get that overview. Do a detailed inventory of the existing digital estate before planning the cloud migration. Gain an understanding of your business applications and their interconnections.

A few services even give you algorithmic advice with precise recommendations for planning the cloud migration. (Full disclaimer: We provide one of those. A highly effective one, even.)

When you have the right information about your digital estate.

When you’ve gained insight into the interdependencies within your IT infrastructure.

Then you can plan your cloud transformation with the right prioritizations.

Read more about the stages of a cloud migration here.

“We need an accurate calculation of cloud capacity.”

Of course, you do.

But the calculation is complex. There are many factors to consider.

Details on capacity and resource utilization in your digital estate. Unclear benefits of the options offered by cloud vendors. Pricing. Licensing.

Calculating the capacity needed in the cloud takes expertise.

It also takes insight into the precise details of capacity and resource utilization in your existing digital estate.

Companies that try to do the math themselves, often find that their cloud costs become sky-high. Much higher than driving IT on-premise.

We recommend that you use a service that can automatically calculate cloud pricing.

Not based on guesswork and moving around numbers, but based on data about the capacity and actual utilization of your current IT infrastructure.

If you calculate cloud pricing 1:1 (that is, if you plan to throw your IT in the cloud with its current configuration and do your calculations based on that), the cost will likely be so high that it won’t pay off.

Instead, calculate cloud pricing with an automatic service that bases the calculation on actual utilization.

An intelligent service will help visualize where you can tune the needs of your cloud capacity.

Most often, this will reveal an economic potential in transforming to cloud.

This is a mistake to avoid.

No, it’s not an easy fix.

It’s about taking your time to do a proper job

Many organizations underestimate the time perspective of a cloud transformation.

The desire to transform often rushes the process.

The consequence of rushing a transformation, ironically, is that the transformation is delayed. Or it breaks budgets. But usually both.

Here’s a simple Danish saying for you:

“Things take time.”

(That’s Piet Hein, for the young ones).

And of course, you are busy.

And of course, you need to fit your IT projects to the business perspectives.

And of course, you need to meet your goals.

But you should not rush this through.

Every unforeseen obstacle you meet is a cause for delay.

So the key is proper preparation.

Lucky for you, you live in a time of intelligent IT and efficient algorithms.

So make use of that!

Use an automatic solution to:

• Do an automatic inventory of your digital estate. Get the full overview.
• Get an accurate calculation of your cloud costs based on your actual utilization.

That enables you to plan your cloud transformation with the right prioritizations. And gives you a solid foundation for a successful implementation.

Proper preparation will save you time and money in the end.

It’s not an easy fix. It’s doing a proper job.

Let’s jump into some definition-gymnastics.

We often tell our customers that we don’t do cloud migration. We do cloud transformation.

The difference?

Most of our customers are smart enough to spot the benefits of one over the other.

When this migration is executed without any prior changes to the digital estate, it’s a lift-and-shift migration.

Some consider this a simple way of executing a cloud migration. In our modest opinion, it’s the opposite. It’s a certain way of complicating your IT.

And although there are several advanced services that support a well-executed and intelligent journey to the cloud (we humbly provide one of those), some organizations still choose to do this simple migration, where they move everything within their digital estate to the cloud. Without thinking twice. Sigh.

When organizations move the entire digital estate to the cloud in a headless lift-and-shift, they always bring a lot of stuff that they don’t need anymore. Shadow IT. Zombie servers.

You would be surprised how much unused IT is left lying around in the shadows of most IT infrastructures.

We find that up to 5% of servers are no longer in use and can be decommissioned. No need to move that to the cloud. And pay a good load of money to store it there. Obviously.

Moving everything without prior assessment and optimization never pays off. You’re just pushing the problems in front of you. Your future self will slap your forehead.

All we say is this.

Want to move your IT to the cloud? Go for it. Just make sure to map out what you have first.

Do an automated mapping of your IT infrastructure. Know what you have.

Now, clean it up before you move anything.

Dust off those servers. Eye out what is no longer in use. Get rid of that.

Really, what we’ve added to the conventional method of cloud migration, is the option for you to improve your IT.

Since you are transforming your IT by moving to the cloud anyway, take this opportunity to improve it.

Full disclaimer: Mugato is not a tool for executing the cloud migration itself. Our main thing is giving you the full overview of your entire digital estate, help you optimize it to make sure it reaches the cloud in its best shape, and maintain the overview of your IT afterward.

As for the migration itself, Mugato will help monitor the process and visualize the ongoing cloud migration, so you can ensure that everything is going according to plan.

Importantly, once you’ve moved to the cloud, Mugato ensures continuous monitoring. So that your IT is managed based on facts about your digital estate. An always updated view of your IT.

We call this a continuous approach to cloud transformation. You can call it whatever you want. As long as you remember both the before and after of the actual migration, instead of just throwing all of your assets in the cloud.

In Mugato, we work with these four stages of a cloud transformation process:

Discover, plan, improve, and monitor.

This is how we work in Mugato. Of course, there are other models and frameworks for the cloud migration process. No matter what you choose, we recommend that you go for a tool or service that is with you all the way. From preparation and planning to beyond the cloud migration itself.