Cloud Migration: Common Mistakes

Cloud migration is no longer new ground; it's standard infrastructure strategy, with most organizations already running workloads in the cloud or actively planning a move. Cost remains a major driver: Flexera's 2026 State of the Cloud Report found cost efficiency is still the most widely cited success metric among cloud teams (81% of organizations), even as more companies now weigh cloud decisions by the business value they deliver rather than cost savings alone. But the potential for savings doesn't make migration simple. Moving your applications to the cloud without the right approach can be just as costly and disruptive as staying put.

Here are some of the mistakes people make when trying to move their applications to the cloud:

Lift and Shift

Lift and Shift is a common approach to cloud migration. The idea is that you can take your infrastructure (servers) and applications (code) as they are currently deployed, either on premises or at a data center, move them to the public cloud and everything will just work, but most of the time that is not the case.

Not only is lift and shift hard to accomplish but it may not be the best, or the most cost-effective, option for migrating your applications to the cloud.

The public cloud is built for automating resiliency, scalability, and high availability. The nature of these features makes it a completely different platform to work with than a typical data center. Moving your applications to the cloud using a lift and shift approach may not allow you to take advantage of the features the cloud offers.

Before migrating your applications to the cloud using a lift and shift approach make sure that is the best option for the application you are migrating.

Lack of Design, Planning, and Testing

Most applications currently hosted on premises or at a data center will have to be redesigned in order to take advantage of the features the cloud offers.

Here are a few things to think about while redesigning your application for the cloud:

How will you achieve high availability?
How will your application scale?
What will your network look like on the cloud?
How will you secure your application?
How will your application be deployed?

Taking the time to redesign your application, coming up with a plan of attack, and making sure your design is thoroughly tested are all things you should consider before migrating your applications to the cloud. Not only will this make your cloud migration easier but it will help you take advantage of the cool features the cloud offers.

Lack of Training

Running applications in the cloud is fundamentally different from running them in a data center, and cloud-native skills don't come automatically just because your team has years of general IT experience. Making sure your staff is trained on the specific platform and services you're migrating to—not just cloud concepts broadly—can be the difference between a smooth migration and a frustrating one. Skills gaps are still one of the most common reasons migrations run long or over budget.

Simple things like security can cause confusion for someone who is not familiar with how things work on the cloud. Confusion over the shared responsibility model remains a common culprit behind cloud security incidents. Analysts have long noted that most cloud security failures trace back to customer-side misconfiguration rather than any failure on the cloud provider's part.

AWS, for example, has a shared responsibility model. AWS is responsible for the security "of" the cloud, while you're responsible for protecting your data and applications running "in" the cloud.

Cost Management

Cost is one of the biggest reasons companies move to the cloud in the first place; however, as the data shows, more organizations today measure cloud success by the business value it delivers, not cost savings alone. Even so, cost management remains one of the most common areas where migrations go sideways.

One of the most expensive parts of migrating to the cloud can be the cost of moving your data. If you have large amounts of data it might take a while to move it to the cloud thus causing delays in your migration. Planning accordingly can help keep your cloud migration costs lower and keep in line with your timelines.

Once you're in the cloud, managing costs becomes an ongoing discipline (see: FinOps) rather than a one-time exercise. It means balancing usability, performance, and scalability: understanding average usage for each component, how critical its performance is, and how quickly it needs to scale during peak periods, so you're not paying for capacity you don't need.

Migrating your applications to the cloud is not enough if you don't take advantage of the cost savings the cloud can offer.

Conclusion

For most companies, migrating to the cloud is no longer a competitive differentiator—it's the baseline. What separates a successful migration from a costly one is how well you plan and execute it. Avoiding the pitfalls above is a strong start, but if this is your first migration, you're likely to hit other issues along the way. Working with an experienced, certified cloud service provider can be the difference between a migration that goes smoothly and one that ends up costing too much and taking too long.

Stratus10 can help make your cloud migration a successful one. Send us a note and see how we can help you move your applications to the cloud and beat the competition.