The Cloud Migration Checklist: 12 Steps Before You Move a Single Workload

Cloud migration is not a weekend project. After leading 50+ enterprise migrations across AWS, Azure, and GCP, I've learned that what happens before the migration determines whether it succeeds. Here's the checklist I use with every client.

Assessment Phase

1. Application inventory — Catalog every workload with its dependencies, data flows, and business criticality
2. 6R classification — For each application: Rehost, Replatform, Refactor, Repurchase, Retire, or Retain
3. Data gravity analysis — Where does your data live? How much bandwidth do inter-service communications require?
4. Compliance mapping — Which workloads have data residency, encryption, or regulatory requirements?

Security & Governance

5. Landing zone design — Network topology, identity federation, logging, and security baselines before the first VM
6. IAM strategy — Least-privilege access, service accounts, break-glass procedures
7. Cost governance — Tagging strategy, budget alerts, reserved instance planning, FinOps ownership

Organizational Readiness

8. Skills assessment — Does your team know the target cloud? Training before migration, not during
9. Runbook migration — Translate on-prem operational procedures to cloud-native equivalents
10. Rollback plan — For every migration wave, define what "roll back" looks like and test it

Execution Planning

11. Wave planning — Group workloads into migration waves by dependency and risk. Start with low-risk, low-dependency apps
12. Success metrics — Define measurable KPIs: cost reduction targets, performance baselines, availability SLAs

The One Thing Everyone Forgets

Day-2 operations. What happens after migration? Who monitors the new environment? How do you handle incidents? How do you optimize costs post-migration? Plan for this before you start, or you'll end up with a cloud bill that makes your CFO cry.