Anti-patterns Against Top-Level Planning

The Incomplete CCoE Team

The centralized CCoE team is established by an enterprise for cloud migration. It guides the entire cloud migration journey. It provides best practices, guidance, and resources to boost cloud benefits and achieve smooth cloud migration. CCoE is like the engine of cloud migration. Without essential members, the team will not function effectively, which may even lead to migration failures. The following are examples of this anti-pattern:

• No cloud architects: Without professional cloud architects, cloud migration will be like a boat without a rudder. A poorly designed architecture limits system expansion and makes maintenance challenging. This creates a fragmented cloud setup with low resource usage. Choosing the wrong technology can cause poor performance, higher costs, and security issues. This also makes it challenging to integrate existing systems with cloud platforms and make full use of cloud native features. As a result, enterprises struggle to benefit from cloud advantages and even encounter potential security and performance challenges.
• Insufficient engagement of the application team: Application teams are the end users of cloud platforms. If they do not fully participate in the work of CCoE, the platform may fail to meet real business needs. Without the support from the frontline personnel, cloud migration designs might fail to address real needs. Poor collaboration with the application team may delay the migration process. Without the application team, promoting DevOps and automation becomes difficult, stifling innovation and blocking the benefits of cloud migration.
• No cloud governance experts: Cloud governance experts are like "housekeepers" of cloud environments. Without them, enterprises face unregulated cloud use, higher costs, and greater security threats. Companies struggle with compliance and risk legal issues without professional governance policies and measures. In addition, without effective monitoring and management mechanisms, problems cannot be detected and resolved in a timely manner, affecting business stability.

For details about how to establish a functional CCoE team, see CCoE.

Starting Migration Without Setting Up a Landing Zone

A landing zone is designed to create a multi-account runtime environment on the cloud that features robust architecture, security, compliance, and scalability. It includes the cloud backbone network, IAM, compliance audit, resource organization, and governance policies. Migrating services to the cloud without establishing a landing zone, a unified infrastructure and governance framework, is risky. This is a common anti-pattern, which is like building a house without a solid foundation. This will lead to multiple issues, slowing down the project progress, raising expenses, and potentially compromising safety. To avoid this, plan and deploy a landing zone before migrating any service system. For details, see Landing Zone Design.

Inappropriate Cloud Operations Model

Inappropriate cloud operations models are common anti-patterns against cloud migration. A right cloud operations model directly promotes resource management, improves efficiency, ensures security compliance, and controls costs on the cloud. Selecting an unsuitable cloud operations model without evaluating your business requirements, structure, capabilities, or objectives may result in inefficiencies, increased security vulnerabilities, budget issues, and complicated management. This prevents you from gaining the benefits of migration to the cloud. The following are examples of this anti-pattern:

• Centralized operations model for fast-changing services: If an enterprise needs to quickly respond to market changes but adopts the centralized operations model, all resource requests and changes need to be approved by the CCoE team. The enterprise may struggle to adapt swiftly to market shifts and often lose valuable business opportunities.
• Decentralized operations model for businesses with high compliance requirements: If an enterprise with a mature and stable business system, especially in industries like finance that demand high security and compliance standards, operates under a decentralized operations model where departments function independently, maintaining consistent security measures becomes challenging, raising compliance risks.
• Empowerment and collaboration operations model for small enterprises with limited resources and budgets: Building and maintaining complex IT systems and governance policies under this model demands significant resources. Small businesses with tight budgets often find it too costly and complicated.