Start with a clear business goal
Teams migrate to cut data center costs, to scale faster, to improve resilience or to retire hardware that is reaching end of life. Each goal leads to a different plan, so write yours down before you touch a server.
A clear goal also gives you a way to say no. If a workload does not help the goal, it may be better to retire it than to move it.
Assess and discover your environment
Good migrations begin with an honest inventory. Map every application, database and integration, and note how they depend on each other. Hidden dependencies are the most common cause of surprises on cutover night.
- Applications, servers and databases, with owners and business criticality
- Dependencies between systems, including batch jobs and third-party services
- Performance baselines, so you can size AWS resources correctly
- Compliance, data residency and licensing constraints
Choose the right strategy: the 6 Rs
Not every workload deserves the same effort. The 6 Rs give you a shared vocabulary for deciding what happens to each one, and most estates use a mix of them.
- Rehost: lift and shift servers with minimal change
- Replatform: make small optimizations, such as moving to a managed database
- Refactor: redesign the application for cloud-native services
- Repurchase: replace it with a SaaS product
- Retire: switch off what nobody uses
- Retain: leave it where it is for now
Build a secure landing zone first
Before the first workload moves, set up the foundation it will live in: a multi-account structure, least-privilege access with IAM, network segmentation, encryption, logging and guardrails. Tools such as AWS Control Tower make this repeatable.
Doing this first is far cheaper than retrofitting it later. It is also where our cloud security and Well-Architected reviews start, so the environment is built to audit standards from day one.
Migrate in waves and rehearse the cutover
Group workloads into waves, starting with low-risk systems so the team learns the process before the critical ones move. Replicate data continuously in the background, test the new environment thoroughly and schedule the switch-over in a low-traffic window.
Every cutover needs a rehearsed runbook and a clear rollback plan. Knowing you can return to the original environment quickly is what makes a low-downtime migration possible. Our AWS cloud migration service follows exactly this wave-by-wave approach.
Optimize once you are live
Going live is the start of the savings, not the end of the work. Right-size instances, remove idle resources, apply Savings Plans to steady workloads and set budgets and alerts. A regular FinOps review keeps costs from drifting as the environment grows.
Then decide who runs it. Many teams hand day-to-day operations to a partner so they can focus on the product, which is the idea behind our managed cloud services. If you want to see how that works in practice, read how managed services improve uptime.
