Cloud migrations fail for predictable reasons — and most of those reasons are avoidable. Here are the 12 steps that organizations consistently skip, and why each one matters.
1. Define the Migration Objective First
"Move to the cloud" is not a migration objective. Cost reduction, improved availability, disaster recovery capability, and enabling remote work are objectives. Without clear objectives, you can't measure success or make trade-off decisions when they arise.
2. Complete a Full Application Inventory
Most organizations underestimate what they're actually running. Before migrating anything, inventory every application, service, and dependency in your environment. Shadow IT — applications running without IT's knowledge — is a common surprise.
3. Assess Each Application Individually
Not every application should move to the cloud, and not every cloud-suitable application should move the same way. The 6R framework (Rehost, Replatform, Repurchase, Refactor, Retire, Retain) gives you a decision model for each application.
4. Map All Dependencies
Applications don't run in isolation. Database dependencies, API connections, authentication services, and network paths all need to be mapped before you move anything. Moving an application without its dependencies is the most common cause of post-migration failures.
5. Conduct a Security Assessment Pre-Migration
Moving to the cloud changes your security perimeter fundamentally. Assess your current security posture, identify the controls you need to replicate or replace in the cloud environment, and establish your cloud security baseline before any workloads move.
6. Establish Governance and Cost Controls
Cloud environments make it trivially easy to spin up resources — and equally easy to accumulate costs you weren't expecting. Establish tagging standards, budget alerts, and approval workflows before anyone has cloud console access.
7. Build a Landing Zone First
A landing zone is the pre-configured cloud environment that workloads will migrate into. It includes networking, security controls, identity management, and governance guardrails. Migrating into an unconstructed environment is the single biggest technical mistake in cloud migrations.
8. Train Your Team Before Migration
Your IT team needs to understand the cloud environment they'll be operating. Waiting until after migration to train on cloud infrastructure creates operational gaps at the worst possible time.
9. Migrate in Waves, Not All at Once
Phased migration reduces risk. Start with non-critical workloads, validate the process, and use what you learn to improve the approach for more critical systems. Big bang migrations are high-risk and rarely go as planned.
10. Test Before Cutting Over
Run parallel environments long enough to validate that migrated workloads perform correctly before decommissioning on-premise infrastructure. Cutover should be a controlled, tested event — not a leap of faith.
11. Document the New Environment
Post-migration documentation is consistently neglected. The team that built the cloud environment understands it; the team that operates it six months later may not. Thorough documentation prevents costly troubleshooting later.
12. Optimize After Migration, Not Before
Organizations often try to optimize during migration — right-sizing instances, refactoring applications — which adds complexity and delays completion. Migrate first, then optimize once workloads are stable in the cloud environment.