From NewGen Consulting
What should you assess before a cloud migration?
Inventory applications, data stores, integrations, owners and support arrangements. Record usage patterns, licensing constraints and dependencies on networks or external systems. Define required availability and recovery targets with the business so the proposed design can be evaluated against real needs.
Decide what to move, change or retain
For each workload, compare retaining it, retiring it, replacing it or moving it with different levels of redesign. Include migration effort and ongoing operations in the decision. Moving an application unchanged may reduce initial work while preserving maintenance problems; redesign can add delivery risk and should have a clear business reason.
Establish the operating foundation
Define identity and least-privilege access, network boundaries, secret handling, logging and backup ownership before moving production data. Confirm permitted data locations and provider responsibilities with the people responsible for those requirements. Test recovery rather than assuming that a successful backup is sufficient.
Plan migration waves and cutover
Group workloads by dependencies and business impact. Begin with a representative workload whose failure can be contained. For each wave, document data synchronization, acceptance checks, communication, the cutover owner and a rollback trigger. Rehearse the process in a suitable test environment.
How do you control cloud costs?
Estimate compute, storage, network transfer, licensing and support using realistic usage assumptions. Assign budget ownership and alerts. After migration, compare actual usage with the estimate and adjust capacity. Include the cost of parallel systems during transition and remove retired resources only after validation.
What proves a migration is complete?
Completion requires more than moving data. Confirm that business workflows work, access is correct, monitoring and support are active, recovery has been tested and performance meets agreed targets. Capture remaining issues and ownership before decommissioning the previous environment.
Explore the next step
Further reading
AWS migration strategy guidance. This guide offers general planning considerations; the scope of an engagement depends on your organization.