Microsoft Azure Migration Gets You Fired: The Risks of Moving to the Cloud

Microsoft Azure is a great platform for hosting your applications and data. However, there are some risks associated with making the switch from on-premises to the cloud. In this blog post, we will discuss some of the dangers of Microsoft Azure migration and how to avoid them.

The cloud is a great way to improve efficiency and collaboration in your business, but there are risks involved in making the switch. Here is a breakdown of the top three risks in the cloud that if not managed correctly can cause your business a lot of pain.

Funnily enough, they are very similar to the biggest risks with any IT infrastructure, but the cloud changes over time so staying on top of them is critical.

1. Data Loss: One of the biggest dangers of migrating is future data loss - make sure you have a backup plan in place that takes account of how the cloud works.

Data loss in the cloud can happen in a number of ways. One of the biggest dangers is when a company decides to move to the cloud but doesn't have a solid backup plan in place. If they lose data during the migration, it can be difficult - and expensive - to get that data back. In addition, cloud providers can occasionally experience outages, and if users don't understand which services are persistent this can cause a lot of issues.

For more on planning your backup solution when migrating to the cloud have a look at our new to the cloud series. This collects together a series of articles on topics you will find useful if you are planning to move to the cloud or have recently moved.

If you want to know more about how CloudOps handles cloud backups, then take a test drive and see how it can help.

2. Cloud Security: You are always hitting a moving target, and its harder to filter out the rest of the world

The cloud is an evolving platform, which makes it harder to put development teams behind a security filter to the outside world. Security in the cloud requires a different approach, as the traditional methods of protecting IT infrastructure don’t apply. The main reason for this is that the cloud is based on shared resources, which makes it more difficult to secure. In addition, security threats are constantly changing and evolving, so organisations need to be prepared to respond to new risks quickly.

We have written an article which goes into this in more detail, which is available here.

Another topic which is always a core requirement is identity management for your AWS & Azure environments. You can manage identity in the cloud for the long term by using a federated identity management system. A federated identity management system allows users to log in to different applications and websites with the same username and password. This is usually implemented by a third-party provider, such as Okta or Azure Active Directory and will work across multiple deployments. For more on working with SSO, please read our full-length article.

3. Unexpected Azure costs: Finally, the biggest risk of them all, is the cost and the nature of pay-as-you-go.

With Azure, you only pay for what you use, but with that comes some risks. If you're not careful, you can quickly rack up a large bill. To avoid this, be sure to monitor your usage closely and adjust your settings as needed. You may also want to consider using a reserved instance or commit to a certain amount of usage each month to get discounts.

One of the biggest complaints we hear about the cloud is the projected cost compared to the actual cost. This is the area that can ruin your IT budget and also if you are not careful get you fired. AWS & Azure costs tend to creep up over time and often once live workloads are put in place, the cost of the infrastructure needed to get the performance can be unexpectedly high.

We have written two articles with more about this, one that discusses this in detail for an AWS environment and one that looks at Azure cost management in depth.

Our cloud management software CloudOps helps with keeping things on track from a maintenance, cost and performance point of view. To take a test drive, get in touch and see how CloudOps can help.