Why cloud migrations fail (and how to fix them)
About half the cloud migration projects we get called into at Globalbit are rescue missions. The original team hit a wall — costs spiraling, timelines blown, systems breaking in unexpected ways. It happens more than anyone likes to admit.
After working on 15+ enterprise migrations (both greenfield and rescue), we've identified five areas where things go wrong. None of them are particularly surprising on their own, but skipping any one of them can derail a multi-million dollar project.
1. Security needs to lead, not follow
Israel is one of the most targeted countries for cyber attacks globally. We've seen organizations treat security as a post-migration checklist item. That approach fails.
One of our clients — a healthcare organization — discovered during a penetration test (which we insisted on before go-live) that their cloud database had default network access rules. Anyone in the VPC could reach it. This was a system handling patient records.
Security architecture has to be part of the migration design from week one. Identity management, network segmentation, encryption at rest and in transit, audit logging. These aren't optional add-ons.
2. "Lift and shift" breaks more than it saves
Moving applications to the cloud without re-architecting seems faster. It almost never is. A retail client moved their inventory management system to AWS without mapping its dependencies on the point-of-sale system. The result was a two-day outage during peak shopping season.
Every application has hidden dependencies — on shared databases, file systems, internal APIs, scheduled jobs. You need a dependency map before you move anything. Not after.
3. Budgets need to account for what happens after migration
The upfront migration cost is maybe 30-40% of the total. Ongoing expenses — data transfer fees, storage scaling, monitoring infrastructure, staff training — catch organizations off guard.
One project we inherited had budgeted $200K for migration. Actual first-year cost including operations was closer to $550K. They hadn't accounted for data egress charges, which alone ran $8K/month.
Build your budget model around 3-year total cost of ownership, not migration project cost alone.
4. Test like you mean it
"It works in staging" is not a testing strategy. Before any production cutover, you need:
- Functional testing — does every feature work as expected?
- Load testing — can it handle real traffic volumes, not just average traffic?
- Failover testing — what happens when a region goes down?
- Security testing — penetration tests against the cloud configuration.
We run all four in an environment that mirrors production, including data volumes. It adds 2-3 weeks to the timeline. Every single time, it catches something that would have caused an outage.
5. Compliance is not something you "add later"
A European client of ours skipped GDPR compliance verification during their migration. Six months later, they received a six-figure fine. The data residency requirements hadn't been checked — personal data was being stored in a US region.
If you operate in healthcare (HIPAA), finance (PCI DSS, SOX), or handle EU personal data (GDPR), verify compliance on your target cloud configuration before migrating. Not after.
Frequently asked questions
What's the most common reason cloud migrations fail? Poor dependency mapping. Organizations underestimate how interconnected their systems are. Moving one piece without understanding its connections to others causes cascading failures.
How do you rescue a migration that's already stalled? We start with a 2-week audit: catalog what's been migrated, what hasn't, where the blockers are. Then we create a revised migration plan with proper dependency mapping, testing gates, and rollback procedures.
Is it ever better to start the migration over from scratch? Sometimes, yes. If the existing cloud architecture has fundamental security or design flaws, fixing them in place can take longer than a clean re-implementation. We've done both.
If your migration is off track and you need a second opinion, we've likely seen the problem before. Let's talk.