Cloud migration projects fail for predictable reasons: underestimated dependencies, skipped security reviews, and teams that treat the cloud like a faster data centre. This checklist covers the ten things we verify on every engagement.
Before You Migrate
1. Map your application dependencies
Before touching a single workload, build a complete dependency map. Tools like AWS Application Discovery Service or Azure Migrate can automate much of this, but they won’t catch every custom integration. Interview your ops team.
2. Classify your data
Know what data you’re moving, where it lives, and what compliance obligations apply to it. GDPR, HIPAA, PCI-DSS — each has implications for encryption, residency, and access logging that need to be designed in from the start.
3. Define your landing zone
A landing zone is your cloud account structure, networking baseline, and guardrails. Setting it up correctly takes a few days. Doing it wrong costs weeks of remediation later. Use a proven framework: AWS Landing Zone Accelerator, Azure Landing Zones, or Google Cloud Foundation.
4. Set your success metrics
How will you know the migration succeeded? Define latency targets, error rate thresholds, and cost budgets before go-live — not after.
During Migration
5. Migrate in waves
Don’t move everything at once. Start with low-risk, non-production workloads. Use each wave to refine your runbooks and catch surprises before they hit production.
6. Run parallel for critical systems
For business-critical applications, run cloud and on-premise in parallel until you’re confident. The cost of a few extra days of parallel running is far less than an unplanned rollback.
7. Automate your testing
Manual smoke tests miss things. Build automated integration tests that can run against both environments so you can compare behaviour before cutting over.
After Migration
8. Rightsize immediately
Your initial instance sizes are educated guesses. After two weeks of real traffic, use your cloud provider’s cost optimisation recommendations and rightsize. Most teams find 20–35% savings here.
9. Set budget alerts
Cloud billing surprises are a leadership confidence killer. Set alerts at 80% and 100% of your monthly budget from day one.
10. Document what you built
Runbooks, architecture diagrams, and decision logs are the difference between a team that can operate their cloud infrastructure and one that depends on the person who built it. Write them while the context is fresh.
Running through this checklist before your next migration won’t guarantee zero issues — but it will mean the issues you do encounter are smaller, faster to resolve, and won’t catch your stakeholders off guard.