Successful AWS cloud migration: Avoiding mistakes and overcoming key hurdles

Are you planning — or perhaps you’ve already started — moving on-premises workloads to the cloud? If so, this article might be of interest to you. The journey to the AWS Cloud can be challenging, and avoiding common AWS cloud migration mistakes is crucial for a successful transition. While cloud migration offers significant opportunities, it also presents challenges that must be overcome. If you take the wrong approach, you risk excessive costs, delays, migration failures, and missing out on the full benefits of the cloud.

If you know the hurdles and risks involved in cloud migration, you can prevent such failures. In the following blog, we show you how to avoid the most common cloud migration mistakes.

Common AWS cloud migration mistakes to avoid

1. No strategy

One of the most important aws cloud migration mistakes that companies can make when migrating to the cloud is to formulate a clear cloud strategy too late, which can serve as the basis for migration planning.

It may seem obvious at first to avoid spending too much time on strategic considerations when migrating individual applications (such as SAP) or booking urgently needed SaaS offerings. However, such an approach is generally not cost-efficient. It is better to approach the journey to the cloud systematically: firstly, formulate and prioritize goals in line with the corporate strategy, secondly, gain an overview of required and existing applications in the company and check which of these can be covered by standard software or SaaS, and thirdly, optimize the architecture of remaining in-house developments for operation in the cloud step by step in order to fully exploit their advantages.

2. Lift-and-shift approach without optimization

In fact, one of the most common aws cloud migration mistakes made during migration is to rely solely on moving existing applications to the cloud without further optimization (“lift-and-shift” or “rehost”). Although this is quick and initially involves less effort, it also misses many opportunities in terms of better scalability, performance or cost control. A combined approach is smarter, in which the optimal degree of migration is determined for each workload - not only “Rehost”, but also selected optimizations (“Replatform”), app modernization (“Refactor” / “Re-architect”), replacement by SaaS (“Replace” or “Repurchase”), retirement (“Retire”) - or continued operation on-premises (“Retain”).

3. Wrong planning approaches

Cloud migration is not about recreating your own data center in the cloud, but about creating something new and achieving strategic goals such as greater agility and innovative capacity, higher cost efficiency and greater resilience. When planning and prioritizing migration projects, the focus should therefore not only be on technical considerations, but above all on business strategy and added value for the company.

Another aws cloud migration mistake: planning is not based on data, but on assumptions, for example about technical feasibility, code quality, the suitability of your own app architectures and refactoring options. Be sure to use automated discovery tools, proven best practices - or our migration and modernization services - for your planning.

Tip: With the Cloud Adoption Framework (CAF), AWS - the world's leading provider of hyperscaler cloud services for companies - has created a conceptual framework that helps you create the conditions for a successful cloud transformation and take all relevant perspectives into account during planning: Business, People, Governance, Platform, Security and Operations. In addition, there is a wealth of further guidance on all aspects of migration and cloud operations, for example AWS Prescriptive Guidance with resources on strategies, frameworks, best practices and tools.

4. Lack of cooperation between operations and development

When it comes to cloud implementations, different teams often pursue different goals: IT staff want to move workloads to the cloud and save on infrastructure costs, while development teams focus on productivity and new application functions. Nevertheless, both groups must work closely together - even when it comes to the often underestimated challenges of cloud adoption, such as functioning data backup, the extension of security concepts to the cloud or governance and compliance.

5. No cloud-compatible procurement, resource and cost management

Most companies are aware of the danger of underestimating the costs of a cloud migration. However, their focus is usually exclusively on the migration projects themselves. In doing so, they neglect the fact that the cloud involves significantly more dynamic and complex procurement and cost scenarios than the on-premises world. Performance bottlenecks or budget overruns as a result of incorrect cloud resource management are then perceived as a shortcoming of the cloud. They can be avoided with a clear understanding of cloud cost structures and billing models, including licensing, as well as functioning FinOps processes: The FinOps approach makes it possible to control cloud expenditure, improve accounting and transparency and better automate business-critical cloud processes. Procurement also offers potential for optimization: you can buy software directly from cloud marketplaces, but alternatively you can also conclude conventional software contracts with hybrid on-premises and cloud rights and often achieve significantly better conditions.

Tip: With the Migration Acceleration Program (MAP) , AWS offers significant funding opportunities for migration to the AWS Cloud through an AWS Premier Tier partner with AWS migration expertise such as SoftwareOne. This minimizes the costs of a cloud migration and allows customers to implement additional projects thanks to possible credits.Erfolgreich migrieren mit SoftwareOne