Cloud Migration Planning and Assessment

Moving workloads to the cloud is a multi-phase project, not a single event. Organizations that skip the assessment phase routinely discover unexpected costs, compatibility issues, and performance problems mid-migration.

The 7 R Migration Strategies (AWS Framework)

1. Retire — decommission applications no longer needed
2. Retain — leave on-premises for now (compliance, latency, or migration cost exceeds benefit)
3. Rehost (Lift & Shift) — move VMs as-is to cloud VMs; fastest, minimal optimization
4. Relocate — move to cloud with the same platform (e.g., VMware on-prem to VMware Cloud)
5. Repurchase — replace with SaaS (e.g., move CRM to Salesforce)
6. Replatform — minor modifications to leverage cloud services (e.g., move to managed RDS instead of self-managed MySQL)
7. Refactor/Re-architect — redesign for cloud-native; highest effort, highest long-term value

Assessment Phase

Before migrating anything, inventory:

• Application dependencies — what talks to what; which apps share databases or networks
• Data volumes — how much to transfer; egress costs if migrating between providers
• Compliance requirements — data residency, encryption, audit logging
• Performance baselines — current CPU, memory, IOPS, and network utilization
• Licensing — some software licenses don’t cover cloud VMs; Azure Hybrid Benefit handles Windows and SQL Server

Common Pitfalls

Underestimating data transfer time — terabytes take days to upload; petabytes require AWS Snowball-class physical transfers.

Ignoring egress costs — moving data between cloud regions or out to the internet costs money that on-premises didn’t have.

Lifting and shifting without right-sizing — on-premises servers are typically 10–20% utilized; a direct lift-and-shift of an oversized on-prem VM wastes cloud budget. See cost management.

Skipping testing — latency between application tiers changes in cloud; distributed architecture behaves differently over a network vs. a local bus.

Migration Tools

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