Cloud migrations fail more often from poor planning than from any technical limitation of AWS, Azure or GCP. Before you move a single workload, work through these ten steps.
1. Inventory everything you actually run
You can't migrate what you haven't catalogued. List every application, database, scheduled job and integration currently running — including the ones nobody remembers the reason for.
2. Classify by migration strategy
Not everything should move the same way. Broadly, workloads fall into: rehost (lift and shift, minimal changes), replatform (some optimization, same architecture), or refactor (rebuilt to be cloud-native). Forcing everything into one strategy is a common and expensive mistake.
3. Model the real cost, not the sticker price
Cloud pricing calculators show compute and storage costs — they rarely capture data egress fees, unused reserved capacity, or the cost of maintaining hybrid connectivity during a phased migration. Model total cost of ownership, not just the monthly bill.
4. Decide your target architecture before you start moving things
Migrating into a poorly planned cloud environment just relocates your technical debt. Define your networking, security groups, identity and access management structure before the first workload moves, not after.
5. Plan for data migration and downtime separately from app migration
Databases are usually the hardest part of any migration — replication lag, cutover timing and data integrity checks need their own plan, distinct from moving application servers.
6. Security and compliance requirements first, not last
If your business has compliance obligations (data residency, industry-specific regulations), those requirements should shape your target architecture from day one, not get retrofitted after migration.
7. Build your CI/CD pipeline for the target environment early
Migrating an application without also migrating how it gets deployed just moves the same manual deployment problems to a new environment. Infrastructure as code and automated pipelines should be part of the migration, not a "phase two."
8. Test performance under real load, not just functionally
An application that works in the new environment isn't the same as one that performs the same or better under production load. Load testing before full cutover catches problems a functional test won't.
9. Have a rollback plan for every phase
Assume something will go wrong at some stage. A migration plan without a tested rollback path for each phase turns a recoverable issue into a business-critical incident.
10. Plan for cost optimization after migration, not just before
Initial migration is rarely the most cost-efficient configuration — right-sizing instances, adjusting storage tiers and reviewing reserved capacity commitments a few months post-migration typically finds meaningful savings.
The bottom line
A cloud migration is a project with real technical risk, not just a vendor switch. The businesses that get burned by "the cloud is expensive" usually skipped several of the steps above, not because cloud infrastructure is inherently costly.
Kordix Labs plans and executes cloud migrations through our Cloud Solutions service — get in touch before you move a single workload.