Five cloud migration mistakes enterprises keep making
Most cloud migrations fail to deliver their promised savings. We've seen the same patterns repeatedly — here's how to avoid them.
Priya Nair
Chief Technology Officer
Cloud migrations are complex programmes with many moving parts. After delivering dozens of enterprise migrations, we've identified five patterns that consistently derail projects — and they're all avoidable.
1. Lift-and-shift without re-architecture. Simply moving virtual machines to the cloud doesn't unlock the economics of cloud. The cost model for cloud is fundamentally different from on-prem: you pay for what you use, and if you've sized for peak load rather than typical load, you'll overspend by 3–5x.
2. Underestimating the dependency map. Every application has dependencies: databases, message queues, third-party services, batch jobs. Missing even one can cause a migration to fail in production. The dependency discovery phase is never as simple as it looks in project plans.
3. No FinOps practice from day one. Cloud spend is variable and can surprise you. Without cost governance from the start — tagging policies, budget alerts, rightsizing reviews — organisations routinely exceed their cloud budgets by 40–60% in the first year.
4. Treating security as an afterthought. Cloud security is a shared responsibility model. Many organisations migrate workloads and leave them in permissive default configurations — publicly accessible storage buckets, overly broad IAM roles — because security wasn't designed into the migration.
5. No operating model change. Cloud requires different skills, different processes, and different governance than on-prem. Migrating the infrastructure without transforming the operating model leads to cloud that's run like a data centre — expensive and inflexible.
The common thread? These are all organisational failures, not technical ones. Getting cloud right requires investment in people and process, not just tools.