Cloud migration is the default strategy for almost every modern business. But simply being in the cloud isn’t a strategy.
The biggest mistake we see is the lift and shift approach. This is where a business takes its existing on-premise servers, with all their inefficiencies and legacy spaghetti code, and simply hosts them on Amazon or Azure.
You haven’t modernised your business. You’ve just rented a more expensive computer to host your old problems.
The Hidden Cost of Bad Integration
The real challenge of the cloud isn’t storage. It’s integration.
Your business likely has a fragmented landscape. You have a 20-year-old ERP system that holds the financial truth. You have a modern CRM like Salesforce. You have marketing data in HubSpot.
When you move to the cloud, you have to make these systems talk to each other. If you don’t plan this integration layer properly, you end up with data swamps.
What’s a data swamp you may ask. Think of them as huge lakes of data that are technically accessible but practically unusable because nobody knows how to join the tables.
Agility vs Governance
The promise of the cloud is agility. You can spin up a new server in minutes.
But that agility is dangerous without governance. We’ve seen clients where a developer spun up a high-performance server to test a theory, went home for the weekend, and forgot to turn it off. The bill on Monday morning was eye-watering.
Real cloud migration services aren’t just about moving data. They’re about setting up the guardrails. We implement cost controls, security protocols, and automated shutdowns to ensure you get the speed of the cloud without the financial risk.
Refactor, Don't Just Move
We approach migration as a chance to clean house. We look at your processes and ask if you actually need to replicate them.
Often, we can replace an entire server worth of legacy code with a simple, modern cloud-native function that costs fractions of a penny to run. That’s where the ROI lives.
For more information about how to effectively optimise your cloud costs, check out our checklist, today.
