You want to move to the cloud, but you don’t want to throw your business into chaos. That’s fair. After all, 75% of businesses experience cost overruns during cloud migration, and those wasted expenses can run into the hundreds of thousands. Never mind issues like:
- Data protection
- Delays
- Service interruptions
- Misaligned goals
All of these concerns are very real and can result in a business that feels like a madhouse.
That’s why having a roadmap is critical to the cloud migration process. It will help your organization reduce friction. Plus, you can make sure you align your tech and business teams on what success looks like.
This guide will walk you through every stage of cloud migration. You’ll be able to see every angle of each step, from pre-migration planning to optimization for the long term. You could be scaling your startup or navigating compliance as a regulated enterprise.
A clear roadmap will help your journey flow smoothly and strategically.
Key Takeaways
- A cloud migration map will help organizations avoid unnecessary costs and project delays.
- This roadmap will align with IT execution with your broader business outcomes.
- When you plan correctly, you can reduce downtime and ensure your operations are agile and fully functional.
Why You Need a Cloud Migration Roadmap
Migrating to the cloud is more than just a technical upgrade. It’s a strategic business initiative.
It affects people, processes, and technology across your entire organization. Without a clearly defined roadmap, you can easily underestimate just how complex cloud migration can be. Here’s a closer look at the “why.”
To Avoid Cost Overruns and Delays
The two most common problems that arise in cloud migration are a poor budget and a poorly managed timeline. With those problems in the air, migration projects spiral out of control quickly. Now you’re dealing with:
- Technical challenges
- Scope creep
- Inadequate resource planning
Without a roadmap, you could easily end up in a situation where you’re reacting rather than proactively navigating a clear pathway.
To Align Your IT and Business Goals
Cloud migration is more than an IT initiative. It’s a business transformation that has a direct impact on your:
- Revenue
- Customer experience
- Compliance
- Scalability
A migration roadmap will make sure your business goals are deeply embedded in every single technical decision your team makes.
Minimizing Downtime and Service Disruption
Business continuity is critical for any organization at all times, but especially during migration. If your migration is causing interruptions and delays in service, it can bring your whole business down. Customers expect uninterrupted service, and your internal teams rely on your systems to be stable and productive.
A cloud migration roadmap will incorporate a detailed plan that ensures downtime is minimal and predictable. It will also mitigate any potential risks that could lead to outages.
Pre-Migration Planning
Before you even think about establishing a plan, you’ve got to prepare for the plan. The behind-the-scenes foundational work sets you up for a successful transition. How?
It helps you:
- Define what success looks like
- Understand your current IT landscape
- Assess your cloud readiness
If you skip this step, you can end up with misaligned priorities and migrating items at the wrong time. You’re basically building a house here, and you need the solid blueprint and site inspection first and foremost. From there, you just follow the plan.
Here’s how to make that plan:
Define Clear Business Objectives
The first step is to understand why you’re migrating.
Is it lower costs?
Better performance?
Easier compliance?
Once you know why you’re making this move, your goals can then inform every decision you make. This includes the beginning of architecture all the way through which tools to employ.
Evaluate Current IT Infrastructure
Next, inventory all of your applications, services, and data stores. You’ll need a complete look at your existing environment and how your systems interact. This will help you avoid migrating components in isolation that rely on services that get left behind.
Once you have a complete picture, assess the performance of your current baselines.
Also, look for opportunities to retire or consolidate legacy systems that no longer deliver business value. If you can get rid of technical debt now, you can simplify your migration process and avoid unnecessary cloud spending.
Perform a Cloud Readiness Assessment
Another critical step in pre-migration planning is to assess gaps in your team’s cloud skills. This step can help you prepare for the worst and fill in those skill gaps where needed. It will also help to get familiar with your application compatibility and security posture. This will help you prepare for how systems will line up and how you’ll need to reinforce security.
Pro Tip: DuploCloud’s built-in compliance and Infrastructure-as-Code (IaC) capabilities make this step easier. We automate key parts of the assessment and planning process, so you can save time, stress, and money.
Choose the Right Cloud Model (IaaS, Paas, SaaS)
Finally, make sure you understand that you’ll need to decide your level of control and abstraction. For example:
- IaaS is for maximum control and is best for legacy application migration.
- PaaS is developer-friendly and good for modern applications.
- SaaS is hands-off and best for productivity tools and business applications.
And of course, DuploCloud supports hybrid and multi-cloud environments. We’ve got pre-built templates to help organizations streamline their deployments.
Building the Cloud Migration Roadmap
Now you’ve got your business goals defined and your environment assessed. It’s time to create a detailed migration roadmap. This map will do so much more than merely chart your path forward. It will become the foundation for your successful execution.
Each step here will help you reduce risk and maintain momentum.
1. Establish a Governance Framework
A solid governance model will make sure your migration is secure, compliant, and cost-controlled. Be sure to define your policies for:
- Identity and access management (AIM)
- Resource provisioning
- Tagging
- Logging
- Cost allocation
Pro Tip: DuploCloud will automatically apply governance and security policies across cloud resources. This reduces human error and improves compliance.
2. Identify Migration Candidates (Apps, Data, Workloads)
You don’t have to move all workloads at the same time or pace. You can instead categorize your applications based on their business value, technical complexity, and dependency mapping.
Of course, you should start with the applications that hold lower risk and are less complex. This will help you build confidence and refine your migration process as you go. Then, when you take on mission-critical systems, you’ll be more than prepared.
3. Prioritize and Sequence Migrations
To that end, you should use a phased approach to migration to minimize potential disruptions. Start with your pilot migration and then move into non-critical workloads. From there, move into core systems.
Prioritizing like this will help you manage risk levels and allocate your resources in ways that make sense to your organization. You’ll also be able to maintain business continuity throughout.
4. Create a Risk Mitigation Plan
Look, every migration is going to involve some risk. So it’s up to you to create a contingency plan that includes strategies for:
- Rolling back
- Backing up and restoring
- Disaster recovery
- Mitigating potential vendor lock-in
Then, be sure to assign clear ownership for each risk category to ensure you’ve got accountability and responsiveness covered.
Migration Strategy and Execution
Okay, you’ve got your plan in place, and it’s time to knuckle down and execute. Following a clear path will help you move seamlessly through your plan without wasting time or money on this migration.
Here’s what you need to implement as you execute:
Lift-and-Shift vs. Replatform vs. Refactor
Which strategy are you going to employ?
- Lift-and-Shift is ideal for fast and easy migration with the least disruptions.
- Replatform will come with minor changes, but they’ll improve your performance.
- Refactor is a full re-architecture to get the most out of cloud-native benefits.
You’ll want to pick the right strategy based on your time, budget, and long-term goals.
Creating a Pilot Migration Plan
When you choose your pilot migration plan, start small. This is your test run. Choose a self-contained application and then use it to test your cloud infrastructure, security controls, and migration workflows.
Setting Migration KPIs and Milestones
As you move through migration, you’ll want to track your progress with metrics like:
- How the app performs post-migration
- Error rates
- How long migration takes to complete
- Whether you stuck to your budget
Managing Change with Stakeholder Alignment
One of the biggest parts of migration is ensuring you have executive buy-in throughout. So be sure to communicate frequently and effectively with your executives as well as your product and operations teams.
Keep your goals aligned and make sure each department understands how they will benefit from this migration.
Tools and Platforms for Migration Execution
You’re ready to migrate? Make sure you’ve got the tools you need in place and that you’re working on platforms that make this process easier for you.
Here’s a look at some prime examples:
Cloud-Native Tools
- AWS Migration Hub
- Azure Migrate
- Google Migrate
Each of these tools gives you visibility into app discovery, tracking, and progress reporting.
Third-Party Tools
- CloudEndure is great for real-time replication and disaster recovery.
- Carbonite is ideal for data backup and migration.
- CloudPilot is awesome for code analysis and cloud readiness.
DuploCloud for Unified DevOps + Compliance
Your one-stop shop for one-click infrastructure provisioning with built-in compliance, DuploCloud is the platform for cloud migration. We automate CI/CD pipelines, networking, identity, secrets, and monitoring, so you can speed up the migration process and maintain solid, steady software development at scale.
Post-Migration Optimization
Alright, you’ve migrated to the cloud. Success! But wait. There’s more. You’ve got to maintain and optimize to ensure the road to software development remains steady. Here are the factors to consider:
Performance Tuning and Cost Optimization
Make sure you fine-tune your resource usage with features like:
- Autoscaling
- Load balancing
- Reserved instances
You can use cost dashboards to continuously identify underused assets.
Continuous Monitoring and Logging
You’ll want to monitor your application performance and the health of your systems in real time.
DuploCloud integrates logging and monitoring directly into the platform. This reduces sprawl and complexity, saving you time and money.
Feedback Loops to Improve Future Migrations
Finally, your team should conduct retrospectives and document lessons they learn through each phase, mistake, and success. Use this data to streamline all future migration phases.
Common Roadblocks and How to Overcome Them
Okay, of course things go wrong when you’re not prepared. So let’s look at what could get in your way, and how to make sure they don’t.
Data Gravity and Transfer Bottlenecks
It’s natural. Large datasets are known to delay your migration process. Avoid this by using compression, chunking, and utilizing network acceleration tools.
Legacy App Dependencies
Some applications require older OS versions or hardcoded IPs. To work around this, use containerization or microservices to isolate and modernize your workloads.
Compliance and Licensing Challenges
DuploCloud features a policy-as-code framework to automate compliance with regulations such as HIPAA, SOC 2, and PCI. Make sure to also automate license tracking and resource tagging.
Creating a Culture of Cloud-First Thinking
Once your system is in place, you’re running in the cloud, and you’re ready to launch this new way of operating, you’ll want to create a culture across teams that is cloud-first.
How do you do that effectively?
Upskill Your Teams for Cloud-Native Ops
Train your developers, your IT team, and your DevOps team on cloud principles and tools.
DuploCloud accelerates onboarding with templates and low-code interfaces.
Foster DevOps and Agile Practices
Encourage continuous integration, testing, and deployment across your organization. Also, be sure to use metrics that your team can see so you can track improvements in the speed and quality of your delivery.
Encourage Experimentation and Iteration
Don’t be too rigid! Give your teams sandbox environments and safe failover zones so they can feel free to innovate without fear.
From Roadmap to Cloud Maturity: DuploCloud Is Here
By now, you know that migration is a one-time event. It’s just the beginning of a long journey and ongoing transformation. Your roadmap must act as a living document that evolves with your business goals, your scale, and your team.
DuploCloud bridges the gap between planning and execution with superior AI automation. This is especially true for fast-growing SaaS companies and regulated enterprises.
With a clear migration roadmap, your business won’t just finally get to the cloud. Your whole team will thrive in it.
Book a demo with DuploCloud today to see how we can help.
Cloud Migration FAQs
How long does a typical cloud migration take?
It depends. Some migrations, the simpler ones, can take a few weeks. More complex enterprise migrations can last for several months. And of course, planning properly and using the right tools can make a huge difference.
What is the difference between cloud readiness and cloud strategy?
Cloud readiness assesses whether your current environment is technically prepared for migration. Cloud strategies, in contrast, define how and why you migrate. This includes your business goals and your resource planning.
Can I migrate without downtime?
Yes! With the right techniques, like blue-green deployments, live replication, and well-timed cutovers, you can eliminate downtime altogether. Additionally, pilot runs and rollback plans will help cut down on risk.
Should I use a cloud migration consultant?
The right consultant can help you accelerate your planning and reduce your risk. If you don’t have an in-house expert, a consultant may be a necessary addition to your team. Platforms like DuploCloud can also simplify the process with built-in automation and governance.
