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Cloud adoption challenges

Cloud has become a key pillar of most enterprises’ digital transformation strategies. Organizations are both migrating new processes to the cloud and augmenting their existing cloud operations to take advantage of new and evolving services. However, these are complex initiatives that many organizations stumble through because of the following constraints and concerns.

Cost and budget constraints

A core reason why organizations adopt a cloud IT infrastructure is to save money. However, there are budget and cost constraints about the moving and running operations in the cloud that often pose challenges for organizations. AWS offers cost estimation and budgeting tools, such as AWS Cost Explorer, AWS Cost and Usage Reports, and AWS Budgets, that can guide organizations and alleviate these concerns.

Security concerns

Organizations are accustomed to having full ownership from the physical building that house the servers to the software on the servers. This ownership made people comfortable that the data was secure. Ownership and the geographic placement of data have become major topics for cybersecurity and cloud policy initiatives around the globe.

As technology has evolved, however, most threats are exploited remotely. The physical location of data has little to no impact on threats propagated over the internet. Organizations often have the misconception that cloud environment is less secure. In addition, organizations IT departments are well versed with security of on-premises infrastructure but often struggle with implementing security in the cloud due to lack of knowledge or skills.

Responding to business requirements

Organizations struggle to identify the different end customers, such as shoppers, content creators, customer service agents, and merchandisers, in a typical e-commerce application setup. This becomes a challenge in a cloud migration initiative to respond and work backwards from the requirements for each customer type.

Managing legacy infrastructure

Organizations may not realize the cost savings immediately from moving Magento Open Source or Adobe Commerce on Cloud Infrastructure Self-Service on-premises installation to the cloud because in some cases the on-premises infrastructure cannot be decommissioned while other services and applications are still running on that infrastructure. This results in expanding the scope for organizations to manage existing legacy infrastructure along with the cloud infrastructure.

Competing projects, staffing concerns, and skills shortages

Organizations struggle with cloud-related skills shortages in existing staff and staffing concerns to hire cloud trained staff. In addition, competing priorities and projects between multiple cloud initiatives at an organization lead to the IT staff split between projects. This ironically leads to slow and costly processes to implement and optimize systems meant to deliver speed and agility. AWS Cloud and managed service providers, such as CloudHesive, offer support services, which have become much more proactive and strategically focused in response to market demand for increased levels of responsiveness, access to tools, and strategic guidance.

Vendor management

Organizations often lack resources to manage vendors and see cloud service providers an addition to that list. Also, getting the right documentation, contract management and compliance reports are other challenges that add to the complexity. AWS, however, simplifies these challenges with its self-service approach and availability of compliance reports online.