Getting Started with Cloud Migration

The Six Rs of Migration

Every workload has a migration strategy. Pick deliberately:

Rehost ("lift and shift") — fastest, least change, preserves technical debt

Replatform — minor changes (managed DB, container runtime) for medium gain

Repurchase — replace with SaaS where viable

Refactor — rebuild for cloud-native; biggest payoff, biggest risk

Retire — delete what nobody uses

Retain — keep on-prem if cloud doesn't earn its keep

A Workable Sequence

Phase 1 — Discovery and Inventory

Catalog every application, dependency, data flow, and SLA. Most teams discover 20–30% more than they expected.

Phase 2 — Pilot

Pick a non-critical, well-understood workload. Migrate it end to end. Document the gaps. Calibrate your estimates.

Phase 3 — Foundation

Build the landing zone before mass migration:

Multi-account/project structure with IAM baselines

Network topology (VPCs, peering, transit gateways)

Logging and monitoring from day one

CI/CD pipelines and secret management

FinOps tagging and budget alerts

Phase 4 — Wave Migration

Group workloads into waves by dependency clusters. Migrate a wave, validate it, move on. Avoid frozen change windows by running cloud and on-prem in parallel where needed.

Phase 5 — Optimisation

Once everything is running, the real work starts:

Right-size compute and storage

Replace lifted services with managed equivalents where it pays

Establish FinOps reviews and chargeback

What Goes Wrong

Migrating data without a strategy. Egress, change-data-capture, cutover windows — plan upfront.

Underestimating networking. Hybrid networking is harder than the slides suggest.

Skipping observability. Without logs and metrics, you can't tell if "it works" or "it works for now."

Treating it as one project. Migration is a programme; expect 12–24 months for a real estate of any size.

The Bottom Line

Migration succeeds when it's treated as a portfolio of decisions, not a single big-bang move. Pilot, learn, wave, optimise.

*We've migrated workloads from on-prem to AWS, Azure, and GCP. Get a migration plan →*