Cloud migration is not merely a technology project—it's a business transformation. Organizations that treat migration as a simple infrastructure relocation often miss the benefits that cloud platforms enable while encountering unexpected challenges.
Assessment: Know What You Have
Successful migrations begin with comprehensive inventory. Understanding current infrastructure—servers, applications, dependencies, configurations—prevents surprises during migration. Discovery tools automate much of this inventory, but human knowledge fills gaps that automated scans miss.
Assessment also examines application suitability for cloud deployment. Some workloads migrate easily; others require modernization or may not belong in cloud environments at all. Evaluating each application against cloud benefits helps prioritize migration candidates.
Migration Strategies
The "6 Rs" framework categorizes migration approaches: Rehost (lift and shift), Replatform (lift and optimize), Repurchase (move to SaaS), Refactor (re-architect), Retain (keep on-premises), and Retire (eliminate).
Lift and shift migrates workloads without modification, offering the fastest path to cloud but capturing limited benefits. Applications continue running exactly as before, just on cloud infrastructure instead of on-premises servers.
Replatforming makes targeted optimizations—replacing self-managed databases with managed services, for example—without wholesale re-architecture. This approach captures more cloud benefits while limiting migration complexity.
Refactoring transforms applications to be cloud-native, using containers, serverless functions, and managed services. This approach maximizes cloud benefits but requires significant investment and accepts higher risk.
Cost Considerations
Cloud economics differ from on-premises. Capital expenditure becomes operational expenditure. Costs scale with usage rather than remaining fixed. This shift can benefit organizations but requires new cost management disciplines.
Reserved capacity commitments reduce hourly rates in exchange for committed spend. Right-sizing workloads prevents paying for unused resources. Automated scaling matches capacity to demand, avoiding the over-provisioning that plagues traditional infrastructure.
Execution Planning
Phased migration reduces risk compared to big-bang approaches. Migrating less critical workloads first builds team expertise before tackling business-critical systems. Each phase provides learning opportunities that improve subsequent phases.
Parallel running—maintaining both old and new environments during transition—enables rollback if problems emerge. While parallel running increases short-term costs, it provides safety margins that often prove valuable.
Cloud migration is a journey, not a destination. The initial migration is just the beginning; continuous optimization realizes the full potential of cloud platforms.