Cloud Migration Best Practices: A Complete Checklist for Success

Start with clarity

Cloud works best when you know why you are moving. Define business outcomes (speed, resilience, cost control) and the KPIs you will track after cutover.

Pre-migration essentials

• Inventory and dependencies: Map apps, data flows, and integration points.
• Right-fit strategy: Choose rehost, replatform, or refactor by app criticality and lifecycle.
• Landing zone: Bake in identity, networking, logging, backups, and guardrails before moving workloads.
• Risk plan: Rollback steps, communications plan, and maintenance windows agreed with stakeholders.

Execution that avoids surprises

• Data first, safely: Encrypt in transit and at rest, validate integrity, and rehearse restores.
• Pilot, then wave: Move low-risk apps to prove the path, then batch by domain.
• Automate: IaC for infrastructure, CI/CD for apps, policies-as-code for security.
• Observability: Dashboards for latency, errors, spend, and user experience.

Post-migration wins

• Right-size and schedule resources to curb costs.
• Enable autoscaling and load balancing for stability.
• Run security posture reviews (CIS, Well-Architected) and remediate quickly.
• Train ops and product teams on new runbooks and cloud-native patterns.

Common pitfalls to dodge

1. Moving without clean dependency maps.
2. Skipping performance baselines, leaving no before and after proof.
3. Forgetting DNS, certificates, and cutover communications.
4. Underestimating identity and access design.
5. Not watching spend from day two.

Proof in practice

For a financial services client, we migrated 150+ apps in waves:

• 45% lower infrastructure spend within 90 days
• 99.99% availability with multi-AZ architecture
• 3x faster releases via standardized CI/CD

Key takeaway

Plan tightly, migrate in waves, secure by default, and measure relentlessly. That is how cloud migration earns trust quickly.