Cloud Migration in Ireland: What Businesses Get Wrong and How to Do It Right

3 days ago
4 min read

Cloud migration is one of those projects that looks straightforward on paper and becomes complicated quickly in practice. Businesses move workloads to the cloud expecting to reduce costs, improve flexibility, and hand off infrastructure headaches, and many achieve all of that, eventually. But the journey is frequently longer, more expensive, and more disruptive than anticipated, almost always because of avoidable mistakes made at the planning stage.

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Mistake 1: Lifting and Shifting Everything

A lift-and-shift migration takes your existing on-premise workloads and moves them to the cloud with minimal modification. It is the fastest approach and the one most likely to leave you disappointed.

Servers running on-premise are typically sized conservatively, a physical server that runs at 20% utilisation most of the time but spikes occasionally gets replicated at the same spec in the cloud. In the cloud, you pay for what you provision, not what you use. A lift-and-shift migration often produces cloud bills that are higher than the equivalent on-premise costs, without delivering the performance or resilience benefits that make cloud worthwhile.

A proper migration starts with a workload assessment: what does each application actually need, how does usage vary over time, and what cloud-native services could replace or enhance it? This takes longer upfront but saves significantly on ongoing costs.

Mistake 2: Ignoring the Network

Moving to the cloud changes how your users and applications communicate. If your office internet connection is not sized correctly, or your internal network is not configured for cloud-first access patterns, performance will suffer noticeably.

Hybrid environments, where some workloads remain on-premise and others move to cloud, need careful network design to ensure traffic flows efficiently between environments without unnecessary round-trips or latency.

Mistake 3: Treating Security as an Afterthought

Cloud environments do not inherit the security controls of your on-premise infrastructure. Your firewall rules, access policies, and monitoring tools need to be rebuilt, ideally improved, in the cloud.

The shared responsibility model in cloud computing means the cloud provider is responsible for the security of the underlying infrastructure, but you are responsible for everything you put on top of it: your configurations, your data, your identities, your access controls.

At Savenet, security is built into every cloud migration from the design stage. We align cloud environments with CIS benchmarks and implement monitoring from day one so that security posture does not degrade after the migration team moves on.

What a Well-Managed Cloud Looks Like

The cloud is not a destination; it is an ongoing operational environment that requires active management to deliver value. That means continuous cost optimisation as usage patterns evolve, performance monitoring with alerting, regular architecture reviews, and security posture management.

Savenet's managed cloud service covers Azure and AWS environments with ongoing management included: we do not simply migrate your workloads and hand them back. We operate and optimise them on your behalf, with full visibility through the same customer portal that covers your on-premise infrastructure.

What is cloud migration and what does it involve?

Cloud migration is the process of moving your business's IT workloads, applications, data, and infrastructure from on-premise hardware to cloud-based services such as Microsoft Azure or Amazon Web Services. It involves assessing your current environment, designing the target architecture, migrating workloads in a planned sequence, and verifying that everything performs correctly in the new environment.

What is a lift-and-shift migration and why is it problematic?

A lift-and-shift migration moves your existing on-premise systems to the cloud with minimal modification. It is the fastest approach but often the most expensive to run long-term. On-premise servers are typically over-provisioned to handle peak loads; in the cloud, you pay for what you provision around the clock. A lift-and-shift migration frequently produces cloud bills that are higher than the equivalent on-premise costs without delivering the performance or resilience benefits that make cloud worthwhile.

How long does a cloud migration take?

Timelines vary significantly depending on the size and complexity of your environment. A small business with straightforward workloads might complete a migration in four to eight weeks. Larger or more complex environments with custom applications, significant data volumes, or stringent compliance requirements can take six months or more. A phased migration approach, starting with lower-risk workloads, reduces risk and allows the team to build confidence before migrating critical systems.

Will our data stay in Ireland or the EU during and after migration?

Both Microsoft Azure and Amazon Web Services have data centres in Ireland and across the EU that allow data to remain within the European Economic Area, which is required for GDPR compliance in most cases. However, data residency must be explicitly configured for each service; it does not happen automatically. Savenet ensures data residency requirements are met from the design stage of every migration.

What security measures are needed in a cloud environment?

Cloud environments require their own security architecture, which does not inherit the controls of your on-premise infrastructure. At a minimum, this includes identity and access management, MFA enforcement, network security groups, encryption at rest and in transit, security monitoring and logging, vulnerability management, and regular configuration reviews against security benchmarks such as the CIS Cloud Foundations. Savenet implements and maintains this baseline for all cloud clients.

What is managed cloud and how is it different from just being on the cloud?

Moving to the cloud is a change of infrastructure. Managed cloud is an ongoing operational service that actively manages, optimises, and secures your cloud environment after migration. This includes continuous cost optimisation, performance monitoring, security posture management, patch management, and regular architecture reviews. Without active management, cloud environments tend to accumulate unnecessary costs and security drift over time.

How much can we expect to save by moving to the cloud?

Savings depend heavily on your starting point and how the migration is approached. Businesses that move thoughtfully, with proper workload optimisation, typically reduce infrastructure costs over time and gain significant operational benefits. Cloud cost optimisation reviews of environments that were migrated without active management often identify savings of 20 to 40 percent on existing cloud bills.