Like many things in life, when you’re new to the cloud you don’t know what you don’t know. Given that migrating workloads to the public cloud is often a key component of a business transformation initiative, you want to avoid a long, expensive learning curve—especially since accelerating time-to-value is often a major impetus for the move.

In a recent survey of hybrid cloud decision makers, we uncovered a disconcerting trend. The vast majority of respondents reported that they are confident in their existing tools and capabilities for a whole host of activities necessary to manage cloud performance and spend … and yet they don’t have many of the tools that are actually needed to perform those tasks.

If the cloud is a destination you have planned for any of your enterprise workloads, then you need to be prepared to navigate the journey that is the cloud migration process. It’s not unlike planning for a physical trip to a fabulous destination (or maybe we’re just really really ready to start traveling again). Either way, we’ve got some travel tips to ensure that your cloud-bound workloads have a great trip.

We often talk about migrating applications to THE cloud, or running workloads in THE cloud, as if the cloud is one, homogenous environment. The reality is, of course, far more complex. There are private clouds and public clouds—and different public cloud service providers (CSPs) that each have their own particular capabilities and strengths. Modern, digitally transformed businesses usually leverage a combination of these clouds.