Challenges in Azure Cloud Migration and How to Effectively Overcome them

Nisarg Rami
3 min readMar 25, 2022

While being on the cloud is the need of the hour and crucial for the result-driven digital transformation, organizations can’t overlook the challenges that tug along with moving to the cloud.

Ensuring data safety, having a team excited for the migration, keeping the cost-optimized, and deciding which cloud to choose are some of the most notorious headaches that will stay longer than you would expect during your journey to the cloud. That’s not the end of it. Hurdles are many, and we have mentioned a few Azure Cloud Migration challenges and ways to overcome them below.

Challenge #1 — Ensuring Right Bandwidth

With IaaS platforms like Azure, ensuring the right kind of bandwidth provision is organizations’ first challenge. Optimized bandwidth is critical when a hybrid cloud solution is at the place as such a solution will have to handle a lot of traffic between local and remote solutions. Before the migration, solutions were used to run on low-latency LAN. After migration, everything will happen in WAN. Hence, not optimized local bandwidth will become a major issue.

Solution — With the assistance of an architecture specialist who can handle the Azure cloud to optimize the bandwidth.

Challenge #2 — The Annoying Cloud Sprawl

Cloud sprawl is another very common and problem-creating cloud migration challenge to deal with. It refers to the situation when organizations aren’t able to make most of the cloud and get confused. Not only does it hinder service delivery, but also it puts all the efforts and investments in vain.

Solution — The easiest way to deal with this challenge is to carry out an extensive IT audit before commending the migration journey and figure out what the team is expecting for the future cloud migration. Watch over every stage of cloud migration and bring visible accountability into action using interactive dashboards.

Challenge #3 — Fixing the Security Loopholes

While you’re moving business-critical data from one platform to another, there is no scope for loss of security. In fact, security should be more robust than before so that incidences like data theft, unauthorized access, and data manipulation don’t happen. Keeping these nuisances at bay during cloud migration is indeed a great challenge that organizations have to overcome for sure.

Solution — Either have an in-house DevOps engineer or outsource it. But, make sure you have one, as this professional will help you figure out the hidden security pain points and fix them before they cause trouble. Security measures such as designing security configuration parameters in the cloud, automating the security surveillance process, and having solutions like 2FA, firewall, and user authentication in place will certainly reduce the risks.

Challenge #4 — Having Ill-Equipped Team

Last, but not least, organizations are having a tough time building a team ready to use the new cloud environment in full swing. Not everyone in the team can make sense of new technology and use it with ease. This is the first step towards digital failure and should prevent at any cost.

Solution — Before you complete the migration, train the employees and fill the skill gap that exists. Ask the vendor to provide team training, arrange sessions to educate your team on the type of cloud you’re going to use and its features, and keep a check on their learning. Demo and video tutorials are the preferable ways to train the employees.

Challenges Aren’t Worrisome

Whenever something great is about to happen, challenges are there. Migrating to the cloud is indeed a great move towards end-to-end digitization, better productivity, and easy data accessibility, provided you overcome the corresponding challenges. Make sure to work with cloud certified partner to address your business needs with advanced skills. Good Luck.

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Nisarg Rami

Nisarg Rami is a Principal Tech Lead and cloud evangelist. Majorly working in enterprise and mobile solutions for the clients from the US, Europe.