It shouldn't come as a surprise that IT leaders are putting a lot of eggs in the cloud basket. By the end of 2020, an estimated 83% of enterprise workloads will be based in the cloud. Platform choices are evolving too, and firms are grappling with the choices, weighing the differences between commodity and custom offerings to fit their application and architectural mix. However, regardless of platform choice, some organizations expect they can dump applications into the cloud and walk away — taking a hands-off approach.

Many aren't doing the due diligence needed to properly assess and facilitate a move of applications to the cloud. This is according to the recent 2019 Cloud Migration Report which revealed half of IT leaders at banks, insurance and telecommunications companies do not conduct adequate risk assessments prior to moving apps over to the cloud. Essentially, they are going in blind and expecting everything to turn out ok. Spoiler alert: It doesn't.

The report shows 50% of businesses don't prioritize what applications need to be moved to the cloud and one third aren't analyzing them before migration. IT decision makers are relying on their "sixth sense" — a gut feeling that it's time, or it's the next logical step in a company's digital transformation journey. The application might be cloud ready too and that becomes reason alone. But it's not enough. Business demand is leading the decision and applications expected to fit into the cloud without prior consideration.

As a result, 40% of cloud migrations are falling short of expectations — failing to meet targets for cost, resiliency and planned user benefits.

Fewer than 35% of technology leaders use freely-available analysis tools. There is a systematic failure to assess the underlying application readiness for cloud migration with a deep analysis of software architecture.

IT teams need to adopt an analysis led approach to cloud migration — assessing both the qualitative business impact and objective composition of their application portfolio. This will make the front-end migration easier and simplify the back-end maintenance over time — if you are ready to begin with, you won't have to overcome serious obstacles later. One small change to an application has a domino effect on the rest of the code set, so when something big, like a cloud migration, takes place and an application isn't ready, the effects can be detrimental with outcomes such as IT outages and loss of business.

Read Best Practices for Successful Cloud Migration for Applications - Part 2, for three best practices for successful cloud migration for applications.