Many organizations are struggling with multicloud strategies. Experts predict that by 2029, over half of multicloud efforts will fall short of expectations. The main issues are poor interoperability and fragmentation. While these stats don’t directly focus on cloud migration, experience shows that migrating to multiple clouds often leads to disappointment. This frustration is often caused by the tools available today, which promise automation but leave big gaps in the process. As a result, IT teams face unexpected work, higher costs, and more complexities than they bargained for.

Limitations of Traditional Cloud Migration Tools

Most cloud providers offer their own migration tools, like Azure Migrate, AWS Migration Services, and Google Cloud Migrate. These tools are designed to make moving to their platform easier, offering automation features like templates and snapshots. However, they tend to be very specific to each cloud. They are built to work best within a single provider’s environment, which makes cross-cloud portability difficult.

This design encourages customers to stick with one cloud provider, often pushing native services that won’t work well elsewhere without major rewrites. For example, using AWS CloudFormation or Azure Cosmos DB locks you into that platform’s ecosystem. These solutions also tend to promote long-term commitments, like three-year plans, which can increase costs and reduce flexibility. While it’s understandable that providers want to keep customers on their platform, it can make migrating or switching clouds much harder for users.

Why Legacy Approaches Fall Short

Infrastructure as code and governance tools aim to improve migration, but they often fall short. Infrastructure as code allows organizations to define their environments in code, but it’s usually tailored to a specific cloud. Moving these configurations across clouds can require major adjustments. Governance products help manage policies and compliance, but they don’t solve the core issue of portability. These tools tend to reinforce the existing silos rather than break them down.

All of these approaches are limited because they focus on moving workloads within the constraints of existing cloud services. They don’t provide a seamless way to transfer applications and data across different platforms without rewriting or re-architecting. This results in delays, extra costs, and frustration for IT teams trying to modernize their infrastructure or adopt a multicloud strategy.

The good news is that a new approach called cloud cloning has been developed. This method aims to overcome the limitations of legacy tools by enabling true portability of cloud infrastructure. In the next article, the focus will be on how cloud cloning addresses these issues and helps organizations finally realize the benefits of multicloud.

Inspired by

• https://www.infoworld.com/article/4127513/why-cloud-migration-needs-a-new-approach.html

Sources

• clouddatainsights.com
• fluidcloud.com
• terraform.io