This article was originally written by Avanade alum Andy Tapaswi.

Cloud seems to be everywhere even though the adoption varies vastly among different industries. Cloud migration is complex and comes with many challenges. Some mistakes are quite common and if not done right at the beginning, it not only becomes difficult to unleash all the promises of the cloud but, in the worst-case, cloud could cost you more than your CapEx on-premise model. Here are three common mistakes that could cost you money.

1. Overestimating your cloud infrastructure needs: Many of our clients come to us to estimate expected cloud consumptions by sharing their current infrastructure specifications with the number of servers, storage sizes and cores in their production environments. These specifications don’t provide any information about the current usages, performance data and the type of workloads. Historically, IT mentality used to maintain an average of 15% to 20% surplus infrastructure capacity on-premise. This first step of estimating cloud consumption could go wrong if we are not rightsizing the workloads. In an ideal scenario, the cloud infrastructure should always run at its fullest capacity. A careful cloud migration assessment to find opportunities to consolidate, retire unused and right size the workloads will produce the best ROI.


2. Failure to setup governance and cost management strategies: Cost management techniques and tools on the cloud are still evolving. Leaving a cloud hosted data warehouse instance on overnight or a compute intensive job left unattended over the weekend is a very common oversight that could result in an alarming invoice at the end of the month. Unfortunately, the majority realize the lack of proper governance and cost management techniques after a few costly mistakes. Cloud providers like Microsoft Azure allow setting up a budget in department level that sends a proactive budget and spending quota alerts at predefined limits. With a little automation, an extra step can be developed either to turn off or put off the workload execution to stay within the limits. Besides, role-based access control and policies will help further control who can create and use costly cloud services with a proper approval process. So, make your people accountable for the cloud consumptions from day one instead of making this an afterthought.


3. Not considering cloud foundational design elements: This is a common mistake in which a company starts application migrations without taking care of the foundational design elements on the cloud. Clients who had adopted such one application-centric view and moved workloads in isolation later found that their migrated applications are fraught with nonconformances incurring many technical debts and causing a significant delay in their overall migration timelines. A longer-term approach by laying down all foundational design elements first to take care of the network, security, compliance, operations, DevOps, governance and other areas for your industry will help eliminate many such hindrances in the journey.

These are just a few of the many costly mistakes that we see companies make when undertaking a cloud migration. Avanade has the knowledge, skills and battle-tested methodologies and tools to help you avoid these mistakes. We work with you to leverage historical investments while securely unlocking the value of the Microsoft cloud.

In today’s business environment, you need to be prepared for anything. By migrating to the cloud, you will be once step closer to doing that.

Learn more about how Avanade can help you prepare for anything and be Ready by Design.