Pitfalls to Avoid in Cloud Adoption: Focusing Solely on Applications

Cloud provides many benefits, including scalability, resilience, and cost-effectiveness. However, it is easy to get overwhelmed throughout the journey because of the cloud’s impact, complexity, and scope. Based on our experience working with different customers across various industries, sizes, and stages of cloud maturity, we’ve grouped common challenges into five major pitfalls to avoid during cloud adoption. 

We're excited to present this five part series on the Five Major Pitfalls to Avoid During Cloud Adoption, and our recommendations for overcoming these challenges.

Pitfall 1: Applying an Application-Centric View on Cloud Adoption

Many cloud adopters consider cloud adoption to begin and end with application modernization. Given the varied interpretations of “cloud-native,” it is easy to conflate cloud adoption with updating applications to adopt specific microservices architecture or Kubernetes/serverless technologies. 

Application-centric cloud adoption often leads to individual application teams engineering the service dependencies, such as access permissions, CI/CD, metrics collection, and high availability as embedded features. This leads to unexpected costs in adopting the cloud. Worse, often, these application-dependent services are engineered on an as-needed basis with fewer engineering resources. This makes the system more difficult to maintain, hence less secure.  

Solution:  Invest in Platform Engineering to Accelerate Application Cloud Adoption 

Investing in a cloud platform tailored to the organization can remove redundant work and avoid making fundamental design decisions too late. Platform engineering is a relatively new paradigm, particularly applicable to cloud computing.

Platform engineers aim to build a tailored cloud platform on the public cloud, such that application developers can directly leverage the curated workflows to provision new cloud resources as the need arises.

The advantages of platform engineering are scalability and focus; by creating a dedicated team managing the bespoke platform centrally, the organization can apply security and operational best practices, new features and services to the cloud platform.

When the platform engineering team can create and maintain critical guardrails and dashboards to shepherd cloud adoption, application development teams can experiment, explore and deploy onto the cloud safely and efficiently. Platform engineering reduces the obstacles to realizing cloud benefits. It also provides a clear transitional path for on-premises IT teams to extend their scope to the cloud.

If you're about to embark on your cloud journey, or perhaps are already on your way and would like to speak about platform engineering and how the approach can accelerate the benefits of cloud, please reach out to our Advisory Team.

Stay tuned for the next instalment of Common Pitfalls to Avoid During your Cloud Adoption Journey, coming soon!

This blog is the first of a five part series:

Pitfalls to Avoid in Cloud Adoption: Focusing Solely on Applications

Pitfalls to Avoid in Cloud Adoption: Perfection as the Enemy of Progress

Pitfalls to Avoid in Cloud Adoption: A Siloed Approach

Pitfalls to Avoid in Cloud Adoption: Ineffective KPIs

Pitfalls to Avoid in Cloud Adoption: Spiralling Out Cloud Costs