| | JANUARY 202519CIOReviewERP MIGRATION PITFALLS - CONSIDERATIONS TO GUARANTEE SUCCESSand decryption carefully to avoid locking out yourself; verify certificates and keys before any moves are considered. Many organisations let their guards down during the actual migration process for expediency, and that may lead to unauthorised access to private or sensitive information.5. To lift and Shift or Greenfield? Lift and shift (rehosting) involves migrating the existing ERP system to the cloud with minimal modifications. It's quicker but may not fully utilise cloud-native capabilities or potentially work at all. Databases are sensitive to the hosting environment. Consider that the migration may be going from a single-tenant environment to a public, shared environment. In public cases, the provider needs to ensure Quality of Service (QoS) and to do that, they must prevent one tenant from consuming all resources, and this typically takes the form of throttling. Some databases rely on having all the resources made available to them. Take the case of SQL; it will consume all available memory unless prevented. Connectivity from servers to databases appears to function the same on the cloud as on-prem, but it is not always the case. The cloud providers tightly control throughput, which can impact performance. When migrating, enterprises may find themselves defeating the purpose of the public cloud because they must pay for dedicated resources.Refactoring or rebuilding can optimise the ERP system to fully leverage the cloud services and resources but to accomplish this, time and money will be needed. Building-to-use cloud-native services offer the primary power of clouds, and those are scalability, elasticity, and flexibility.6. Licenses and MaintenanceIt's crucial to ensure compliance with licensing agreements to avoid legal and financial issues. Many software licenses are based on CPUs, cores, servers, and or users. Moving to a completely different infrastructure will impact licenses, and therefore it is paramount to fully engage suppliers and understand the impacts. Maintenance contracts may no longer hold true on the cloud and may result in additional costs to terminate existing or potentially not be available at all in the new environment.7. Administration On-Premises Is Not the Same as Administration on the CloudWhile hosting an ERP on-premises versus in the cloud comes with various differences, there are certain administrative aspects that might remain relatively consistent between the two environments. Think of capacity management, monitoring, backup and recovery, and refreshes, for example. Is not the cloud provider responsible for making sure the services are always up and running? Don't clouds automatically include redundancy by default? Often companies make the mistake of thinking and relying on the cloud provider to fulfil the functions and roles of existing IT data centre experts leading to believing the cloud is at fault.Vastly different is the public cloud from other hosting environments with its almost infinite resources and flexibility. The focus is no longer on managing to fit and run data and applications to avoid performance issues; the focus is now on controlling sprawl and cost. The migration process is a one-time event, typically, but the fine-tuning is never-ending. ERP systems are constantly evolving, and so are the clouds and as such, the new paradigm is change is the new constant. Communication is an essential cornerstone of a successful migration. Communication serves as the glue that binds together team members, stakeholders, and all involved
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