FREE Cloud Migration Checklist (for Azure, AWS + More)

by Michael Roche - October 19, 2020

As you get ready to move your business’s services to The Cloud, avoiding common mistakes and planning around a cloud migration checklist can save you money. It can also save you a lot of hassle.

To help you on your path to The Cloud, make sure you’re ticking all four boxes from our Cloud Migration Checklist below. And if you’re migrating a LAMP site, be sure to download our free how-to guide once you’re ready!

Cloud Migration Checklist

1. Decide between moving your entire services all at once, or as a progression (and understand the pros and cons).

For some businesses, an all-at-once migration to The Cloud is unrealistic. In this case, you need to prioritize, and the strategy here may differ depending on what you decide is most important. If you’re looking for the cleanest migration path, it may make sense to start with your most internal services (the ones with the fewest dependencies). On the other hand, if you want to be able to address your customer experience more quickly, you might structure your cloud migration path from the outside in. Whatever you decide, you want to feel confident in your decision when you start migrating your services so that you don’t have to change course later.

2. Create baseline KPIs from your pre-Cloud metrics to understand whether your Cloud migration is succeeding.

Establishing key performance indicators (KPIs) is critical to accurately measure the success of your business functions when you’re going full steam ahead in The Cloud. So, make sure you have a clear record of what your KPIs have been working from dedicated servers. This pre-Cloud data will prove crucial as a metric for whether your cloud migration was successful or not when the migration is complete.

3. Make sure your web apps are up to par — and if they’re not, commit to a thorough code refactoring.

Before you migrate any of your web apps to The Cloud, make sure your IT team has done code refactoring for them. If your web apps are running optimally as soon as you’ve migrated them to The Cloud, then you’ll save money in cloud computing costs by having preemptively sniffed out their inefficiencies. One such example could be changing your framework’s database driver to a remote database store.

4. Tailor your data migration plan smartly.

It’s no surprise that data migration services like Microsoft Azure and Amazon Web Services are so popular. After all, an application’s speed and functionality can be vastly reduced if data is moved to The Cloud when the service for accessing it is still happening on-premise (and vice versa).

Setting up a syncing mechanism between your Cloud and on-premise databases can solve this, but often the more reliable solution is to go with a data migration services — and, remember, our managed cloud services plans pair well with Azure, AWS, and other data migration services!

So, whether it’s an Azure migration checklist, an AWS migration checklist, or a different database migration service you think you need, you’ll want to make sure you “tick” the boxes on all four of the checklist suggestions listed above. And after you do that, be sure to follow our step-by-step guide for migrating your website or reach out to our Managed Cloud Services team to assist you.

It’s certainly an exciting time to be moving to The Cloud! Considering the decisions in front of you, abiding by a general cloud migration plan template or the checklist included above should help you to make the transition more smoothly.