Cloud Migration: Best Practices for a Smooth Transition

Moving to the cloud can transform your business, but it requires careful planning and execution. Here are the key strategies we've learned from helping numerous clients successfully migrate their infrastructure.

1. Assess Your Current State

Before making any moves, you need to understand:

• What applications and workloads you have
• Dependencies between systems
• Current performance baselines
• Compliance and security requirements

Pro tip: Use automated discovery tools to map your entire infrastructure. Manual inventories often miss critical dependencies.

2. Choose the Right Migration Strategy

Not everything should be "lift and shift." Consider these approaches:

Rehost (Lift and Shift)

Move applications as-is to the cloud. Fast but doesn't take full advantage of cloud capabilities.

Replatform

Make minimal changes to optimize for cloud. Good balance of speed and benefit.

Refactor

Rebuild applications to be cloud-native. Most beneficial long-term, but requires more time and resources.

3. Start Small

Don't try to migrate everything at once. We recommend:

1. Start with non-critical applications
2. Learn from the experience
3. Refine your process
4. Scale to more critical systems

4. Security First

Cloud security is different from on-premises:

• Implement identity and access management (IAM) properly
• Use encryption at rest and in transit
• Set up monitoring and logging from day one
• Follow the principle of least privilege

5. Plan for the Unexpected

Have rollback plans. Not every migration goes perfectly the first time, and that's okay. What matters is having a plan to recover quickly.

Need Help?

Cloud migration is complex, but you don't have to do it alone. Contact us to discuss how we can help make your cloud journey successful.