Across India’s rapidly evolving digital economy, organisations are accelerating their move to the cloud to modernise operations and support growth. The benefits of cloud migration such as scalability, flexibility, and cost efficiency are compelling especially for businesses navigating competitive markets and increasing customer expectations. However, cloud adoption is rarely as straightforward as it seems.

Many Indian enterprises underestimate the true scope of cloud migration challenges, particularly when transitioning from on-premises environments. Without a clearly defined cloud migration strategy, organizations often encounter operational disruptions, security gaps, and rising costs that dilute the expected benefits of cloud migration.

This blog explores the most common cloud migration challenges businesses underestimate and practical ways to address them effectively.

Understanding Cloud Migration Challenges in the Indian Context

For businesses in India, cloud migration is not just a technology decision, it is a strategic enabler for digital transformation. Yet cloud adoption challenges often stem from fragmented IT environments, legacy applications, regulatory considerations and skill shortages.

Understanding cloud migration challenges and solutions early allows organisations to plan realistically, minimise risks, and build a cloud foundation that supports long-term business objectives rather than short-term gains.

Treating Cloud Migration as a One-Time Exercise

One of the most underestimated on-premise to cloud migration challenges is treating migration as a single, time-bound project. Many organisations attempt a rapid “lift-and-shift” approach, moving workloads without optimising them for cloud environments.

While this may accelerate timelines, it frequently results in inefficient resource usage, performance bottlenecks and higher operational costs. Legacy applications designed for on-premise infrastructure often fail to leverage cloud-native capabilities.

A successful cloud migration strategy requires application assessment, dependency mapping, and choosing the right migration approach for rehosting, refactoring, or rebuilding based on business priorities. The Migration should be phased, measurable, and aligned with operational goals.

Underestimating Risks During Cloud Migration

Another critical area businesses overlook is the range of risks during cloud migration. These include service downtime, data inconsistencies, integration failures, and business disruption, especially in customer-facing systems.

Many organisations assume cloud providers eliminate risk entirely. In reality, Cloud migration risks and mitigation responsibilities are shared. Without structured planning, these risks can directly affect revenues and indirectly affect customer trust.

Security, Compliance and Governance Challenges

Security remains one of the most significant cloud adoption challenges for Indian organisations. Misunderstanding the shared responsibility model often leads to gaps in access control, data protection and compliance management.

With regulations such as India’s Digital Personal Data Protection Act (DPDPA) and industry-specific compliance requirements, security and governance must be embedded into cloud planning, not added later.

Skills Gaps and Change Management Issues

Cloud migration is as much about people as it is about platforms. Many organisations underestimate the skills required to manage cloud-native environments. Teams accustomed to traditional infrastructure often struggle with DevOps models, automation tools, and cloud security frameworks. These skill gaps slow adoption and reduce the long-term benefits of cloud migration.

Investing in structured training programs, cloud certifications, and change management initiatives can help reduce the skill gaps. Combining internal capability building with managed cloud services helps organisations maintain momentum while reducing operational risk.

Cost Management and Optimisation Challenges

A common misconception is that cloud environments automatically reduce costs. Whereas the truth is that poor governance can quickly erode financial benefits. Unused resources, over-provisioning or simply lack of visibility can become common cloud migration challenges businesses underestimate.

For Indian businesses that operate under tight budgets, uncontrolled cloud spending can become a major concern.

Implementing cost governance frameworks, regular monitoring, and continuous optimisation practices can be the way to reduce costs effectively. Cost management should be embedded into day-to-day operations, not treated as a post-migration activity.

Integration and Dependency Complexities

Enterprise IT environments are rarely isolated. The Applications have dependency on databases, APIs, third-party platforms and legacy systems. During migration, overlooked dependencies often lead to performance issues or service disruptions.

These integration-related cloud migration challenges are particularly common in hybrid environments and can be solved by conducting a detailed dependency map and integration testing. Hybrid or phased migration models help maintain stability while transitioning critical workloads.

Challenges Businesses Underestimate After Migration

Challenges businesses underestimate include performance tuning, security monitoring, compliance audits, and cost optimisation. Without continuous improvement, cloud environments fail to deliver sustained value.

Best Practices to Overcome Cloud Migration Challenges

To address cloud migration challenges and solutions effectively, businesses should:

• Define a business-aligned cloud migration strategy
• Assess applications, data, and dependencies thoroughly
• Identify and mitigate cloud migration risks early
• Embed security, compliance, and governance from day one
• Invest in skills development and change management
• Monitor performance, security, and costs continuously

These practices help organisations overcome cloud adoption challenges while maximising the benefits of cloud migration.

Cloud Migration Strategy: Next Steps for Indian Businesses

A well-executed cloud migration strategy enables flexibility, reliability, and continuous improvement. For Indian organisations that are navigating through the digital evolution, cloud adoption can support expansion, regulatory compliance, and customer-centric services when approached strategically.By acknowledging and addressing on-premise to cloud migration challenges, businesses can minimise risks during cloud migration and build scalable, future proof IT environments.

If your organisation is planning a cloud migration or facing challenges with cost, security, or compliance, get in touch with our experts to discuss a tailored cloud migration strategy.

References:

• National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST)
  Special Publication 800-53 & 800-144: Security and Privacy Controls for Information Systems and Cloud Computing.
• International Organization for Standardization (ISO)
  ISO/IEC 27001:2022 – Information Security Management Systems.
• Ministry of Electronics and Information Technology (MeitY), Government of India
  Digital Personal Data Protection Act (DPDPA), 2023.
• Microsoft
  Cloud Adoption Framework for Azure.
• Google Cloud
  Cloud Architecture Framework and Migration Best Practices.
• ENISA (European Union Agency for Cybersecurity)
  Cloud Security Risk Assessment and Threat Landscape Reports.
• IDC
  Cloud Pulse and Enterprise Cloud Adoption Studies.

Frequently Asked Questions (FAQs)

What are the challenges of cloud migration?

Security risks, cost management, skills gaps, integration complexity, and governance issues are among the most common challenges.

Why do cloud migrations fail?

Cloud migrations fail due to unclear strategy, underestimated risks, lack of skills, and insufficient post-migration optimisation.

What are the biggest risks in cloud migration?

Downtime, data loss, compliance failures, misconfigurations, and uncontrolled cloud spending.

How can cloud migration challenges be mitigated?

Through a structured cloud migration strategy, phased execution, risk assessment, and continuous optimisation.

What are the 7 types of cloud migration?

Rehost, refactor, revise, rebuild, replace, retire, and retain.

What are the benefits of cloud migration?

Scalability, flexibility, cost optimisation, resilience, faster innovation, and improved business continuity.