A Practical Cloud Migration Checklist: What to Settle Before You Move
Cloud Solutions · November 12, 2026 · 3 min read
Moving to the cloud rarely fails because of the technology. It fails because of decisions nobody made in advance: what to move first, who can access what, how much it will cost, and how to go back if something breaks. Use this checklist to settle those questions before you start.
1. Take inventory
List every application, database, scheduled job and integration you run today, along with who depends on each one. Note the data each system holds, how large it is, and how sensitive it is. You cannot plan a migration around systems you have forgotten about.
2. Choose a strategy per application
Not everything should move the same way. Common options are:
- Rehost: move it as it is, with minimal change. Fast, but you keep existing inefficiencies.
- Replatform: make small changes to benefit from managed services, such as moving to a managed database.
- Refactor: redesign parts of the application to take advantage of cloud features. Slower and costlier, but often the biggest long-term gain.
- Replace: switch to a ready-made service instead of maintaining your own.
- Retire or retain: shut down what nobody uses, and leave in place what has good reasons to stay.
3. Set your security baseline first
Decide this before workloads arrive, not after:
- Use multi-factor authentication for every human account.
- Give each person and service only the permissions it needs.
- Keep secrets such as passwords and API keys in a managed secrets store, never in code.
- Encrypt data at rest and in transit.
- Turn on logging and keep audit logs somewhere separate from the systems being logged.
4. Plan your costs
Cloud bills reward attention. Set budgets and alerts before you migrate, tag every resource with its owner and purpose, and review spending weekly in the first months. Shut down test environments you are not using. Compare the cost of always-on resources with options that scale to zero when idle.
5. Design for backup and recovery
Write down how much data you can afford to lose and how long you can afford to be offline for each system. Then make sure your backups and recovery steps meet those targets, and actually test a restore. A backup you have never restored is a hope, not a plan.
6. Set up monitoring
Decide what "healthy" means: response times, error rates, queue lengths and costs. Create dashboards and alerts so the right person is told when something drifts, rather than finding out from a customer.
7. Rehearse the cutover
Migrate a low-risk system first and treat it as a rehearsal. For each production move, prepare a written runbook with the steps, the owner of each step, how you will verify success, and exactly how you will roll back. Choose a quiet time, and keep the old environment available until you are confident.
8. Prepare your people
Cloud platforms change how teams work. Make sure the people who will run the new environment have time to learn it, and that responsibilities for security, cost and on-call support are clearly assigned.
Quick pre-flight check
- Inventory and owners documented
- Migration strategy chosen for each application
- Security baseline in place
- Budgets and alerts configured
- Restore tested at least once
- Monitoring and alerts live
- Runbook and rollback plan written
If you would like help planning a migration, contact us and we will go through your systems with you.