Common Pitfalls in Cloud Migration: How to Avoid Expensive Detours
Chosen theme: Common Pitfalls in Cloud Migration. Moving to the cloud can feel like trading a map for a compass—liberating, but easy to drift off course. Today we unpack the traps that derail timelines, inflate costs, and rattle confidence. Expect practical tips, true-to-life stories, and checklists you can use immediately. Share your experiences, subscribe for fresh guidance, and help others dodge the same pitfalls.
Spotting Red Flags Before They Escalate
If no one can answer why you are moving a workload, your risk climbs. Without clear business outcomes—cost, resilience, speed, compliance—teams improvise wildly, and stakeholders lose patience fast. Write measurable goals, socialize them, and revisit monthly to prevent scope drift and hidden tradeoffs.
Spotting Red Flags Before They Escalate
Spreadsheets scattered across inboxes guarantee conflicting inventories and missed dependencies. Establish a living backlog and authoritative configuration source before migrating. When someone asks which version is real, you should confidently point to one place, not a patchwork of guesses and outdated diagrams.
Spotting Red Flags Before They Escalate
A tiny pilot on an isolated service can paint a fantasy. Validate pilots under realistic load, security, and network constraints. One team learned this the hard way when a cheerful demo masked latency bombs that exploded during the first quarter’s busiest sales weekend.
Discovery and Assessment Gaps
Shadow IT and Hidden Dependencies
That unregistered reporting job the finance intern made two summers ago still hammers a production database at 2 a.m. Find it. Inventory applications, jobs, data flows, and unmanaged scripts. Run dependency mapping tools, then validate with interviews, because people often know what scanners miss.
Licensing and Entitlements Surprises
Assuming on-prem licenses transfer is a budget minefield. Some software requires cloud-specific licensing or higher editions for the same features. Engage vendors early, model true costs, and document entitlements to avoid emergency purchases that derail approvals and erode trust with finance.
Data Gravity and Latency Realities
When data stays on-prem and compute moves to the cloud, gravity wins and latency punishes. Either colocate data with compute or design cache and replication strategies. Test cross-region and hybrid scenarios, and publish expected round-trip times so architects design with physics, not wishes.
Data Migration Mistakes That Haunt Cutover
Cutover is not a calendar invite; it is a choreography. Define freeze windows, delta syncs, rollback steps, and accountability by name. Practice dry runs with real volumes. One team reduced downtime from eight hours to forty minutes simply by rehearsing with production-like data.
Cost Overruns and FinOps Missteps
Choosing the biggest instance to be safe burns cash. Right-size continuously using actual utilization data, and switch to autoscaling where viable. Adopt performance tests, not assumptions, and publish cost-to-value metrics so teams see the rewards of sizing responsibly and iterating pragmatically.
Cost Overruns and FinOps Missteps
Snapshots, unattached volumes, and zombie environments silently drain budgets. Schedule non-production shutdowns, apply lifecycle policies, and tag everything with owner and purpose. Monthly cleanups, gamified for teams, turn waste hunting into a healthy habit that improves culture and reduces bills dramatically.
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People, Process, and Culture: The Hidden Multiplier
Undertrained teams lean on guesswork. Fund hands-on labs, pair migrations with learning sprints, and reward documented lessons. Encourage engineers to present five-minute wins in demos. Tell us which learning path helped your team most, and we will feature it in a future post.
