South African businesses are spending a lot of money on IT. In fact, when it comes to IT spend, SA was one of the fastest-growing countries globally, according to Gartner.

“South Africa is still behind in terms of overall IT spending and continues to have a technology debt to pay off. However, by achieving 3.9% growth in 2019, South Africa will be one of the fastest-growing countries in the world — ranked fourth globally,” said John-David Lovelock, distinguished research VP at Gartner.

So, what are we spending money on? According to Lovelock, cloud is a popular choice for South African brands and has become a “new reality”.

While cloud has the potential to be the ultimate tool for business transformation – as we’ve seen in recent months thanks to the coronavirus – enterprises need to be aware of the risks. While making sure that your journey to the cloud is a success is important, it is equally important to mitigate the risks of cloud after you’ve implemented it. We’ve put together a list of the four most common cloud risks. Take a look.

#1 Failing to plan: When travelling from point A to point B, it’s usually easier if you have a route in mind. One of the most common reasons that cloud migrations fail is lack of planning. Moving to the cloud isn’t as simple as dragging an app from your in-house servers and then “dropping” it into the cloud. And once you’ve made your move to the cloud you need to make sure that you have the right people in place to support your cloud usage and ensure that your cloud experience is a positive one. It is important to hire cloud experts, or partnering with cloud professionals, so that problems are dealt with as swiftly as possible.

#2 Forgetting about security: In line with the above, it is foolhardy to assume that all of the hard work is done once you’ve successfully made the move to cloud. If your security policy and your cloud strategy don’t align, you’re headed for trouble. Having security set up correctly at the time of migration is only the first step. Your IT team need to incorporate security audits and maintenance into their regular processes to make sure that security is prioritised across all environments.

#3 Missing the human side: Sure, the technology is important but so are the people. If you don’t have buy-in from your team, your cloud migration may struggle to get off the ground. Cloud is not a “pure technology” solution. In the same way that you need a migration plan, you also need to develop guidelines and strategies to engage with employees and stakeholders. This is a critical component of any successful cloud adoption programme.

#4 Overlooking the value of visibility: The golden rule of any data migration is prioritising visibility before, during and after migration. Without proper visibility, problems may only be discovered once it’s too late. Often, organisations move to the cloud with no idea of how much their monthly cloud bill is going to be. This makes it critical to properly monitor and manage all the costs associated with migration – from identifying idle and unused resources to tracking usage across each, individual user.

Having an effective cloud expense management solution in place makes it possible for businesses to leverage the benefits of cloud, without the risks of cloud overspending. OneView automates technology and cloud expense management, providing you with full visibility and complete control of your entire technology environment. Want to sign up for a Cloud Expense OneView Trial? Go to our Azure Marketplace listing, here.