Cloud Migration Strategy
Migrating workloads to public cloud is one of the most common and complex technology strategy initiatives. Done well, it delivers agility, scalability, and cost efficiency. Done poorly, it produces higher costs, operational complexity, and technical risk. A well-structured migration strategy maximises success probability.
Migration Strategy Choices (AWS 6 Rs)
- Rehost (lift-and-shift): Move VMs to cloud infrastructure unchanged. Fast, low risk, limited cloud benefit. Good for: legacy systems, time-constrained migrations.
- Replatform: Minor changes to use cloud-managed services — RDS instead of self-managed database, Elastic Load Balancer instead of HAProxy. Moderate effort, significant operational benefit.
- Refactor/Re-architect: Redesign applications to be cloud-native — microservices, serverless, managed services throughout. High effort, highest long-term benefit.
- Repurchase: Replace with SaaS (e.g., move to Salesforce instead of migrating custom CRM)
- Retire: Decommission workloads that are no longer needed
- Retain: Keep on-premises (regulatory, latency, or specific requirements)
Migration Sequencing
Start with lower-risk workloads to build cloud capability before migrating critical systems. Establish cloud foundations first: account structure, networking, identity and access management, security baselines, and observability infrastructure. A well-structured landing zone is essential for a successful migration programme.
FinOps: Managing Cloud Costs
Cloud costs are variable and can surprise organisations used to predictable data centre costs. FinOps (cloud financial management) practices: tagging all resources for cost allocation, setting budgets and alerts, right-sizing instances, using reserved capacity for predictable workloads, and regular cost optimisation reviews.