A practical checklist for moving to the cloud

The most successful cloud migrations are the least ambitious on day one. Move a workload because it removes a real constraint, not because the cloud is fashionable.

Start with an inventory and a target model. For every workload, know where its data lives, how it depends on other systems, and who operates it today. Workloads that are hard to move now will still be hard to move six months in — write that down honestly.

Choose a narrow first wave. Pick a workload with clear boundaries, small blast radius, and an owner who can dedicate time. Prove the pattern end-to-end before repeating it at scale.

Plan the cutover before you start building. Decide how data synchronises, how long you will run both environments in parallel, and what the rollback trigger looks like. A migration without a rollback plan is a bet, not a plan.

Automate what you can, but do not let automation hide surprises. Infrastructure-as-code makes environments reproducible; it does not remove the need to verify that production actually behaves like staging.

The operational work does not end at cutover. Budget time after go-live for monitoring, alerting, rightsizing and training — a migrated workload that nobody can operate is a new problem, not a finished project.