Introduction
The cloud is a vital tool for businesses looking to keep up with the demands of the 21st century. More employees than ever before work remotely and need access to critical infrastructure to do their jobs. The public is embracing digital solutions for commerce, healthcare, and other aspects of their lives. And the demands of the global economy require smaller teams to iterate faster with fewer resources.
As a result, businesses are migrating to the cloud for increased security, enhanced speed, automation, as well as other vital features it brings to their workflow. Gartner forecasts that cloud end-user spending will reach nearly $600 billion by the end of 2023 as businesses require infrastructure-, desktop-, and platform-as-a-service solutions to increase their ability to adapt to a constantly shifting development landscape.
Migrating to the cloud is a complex, time-consuming process with many moving parts. Multiple teams and systems need to move in sync to shift to the cloud without experiencing excessive downtime or loss of data.
However, with the right tools, planning, support, and buy-in from key stakeholders, migration can be a relatively painless process. Doing the necessary prep work upfront will pay dividends when it comes time to migrate your data.
We at DuploCloud firmly believe that the cloud is the future of doing business, and we want to help as many teams as possible successfully make that transition. To that end, we’ve compiled the following checklist to outline the steps for successful cloud migration, from pre-planning through to execution and testing.
Let’s dive in.

Pre-planning
- ☐ Define the business' goals for migration.
- ☐ Identify key IT and business stakeholders.
- ☐ Identify the cloud migration team.
Planning
- ☐ Create your plan.
- ☐ Inventory the on-premises applications being prepared for migration.
- ☐ Assess the cost of migration.
- ☐ Create your migration timetable.
- ☐ Train staff on necessary skills for a successful migration.
Execution
- ☐ Start with smaller pilot workloads to test your plan.
- ☐ Begin the migration.
Testing
- ☐ Review resource allocation and performance.
- ☐ Test functionality.
- ☐ Switch over production to live cloud server.
Go-Live
- ☐ Switch over interactive elements to users.
- ☐ Communicate progress with key stakeholders during the entire process.
- ☐ Continue to monitor and optimize post-go-live.

Phases of a Successful Cloud Migration
Pre-planning
- ☐ Define the business' goals for migration.
Knowing why you are migrating will determine what you need to succeed. Establishing KPIs early in the planning process will help you quantify success after migration. Important KPIs include:
- User experience: Load times, session spikes, lag.
- Performance: Errors, memory/CPU usage, time outs, throughput.
- Engagement: Conversions, check-out times, engagement rates.
- Costs: Compare monthly hardware, billing, staffing, and servicing costs pre- and post-migration.
- ☐ Identify key IT and business stakeholders.
Keeping a contact list will ensure teams know the work is being done and help keep all parties informed as the timeline progresses.
- ☐ Identify the cloud migration team.
Also, designate a migration architect to take ownership of the project. This team will need to be trained on cloud migration processes and the necessary tools to complete the migration. They should be involved in every step of the migration from now on.
Planning
- ☐ Create your plan.
Are you performing a shallow “lift and shift” migration, or will you need a deeper cloud integration? Will you migrate first, then modernize, or modernize as you go? Will you be migrating to a single cloud environment, or will it be a hybrid between cloud and on-premises networks? Are there any compliance issues that the migration team must address before arriving at a solution?
Defining the scope of your migration during the planning phase will help you determine the work needed before migrating and the tools and resources you need to complete the migration.
Standard migration methods include:
- Rehosting: A “lift and shift strategy” that transfers the on-premises tech stack into the cloud. The quickest option but the least flexible and most limited.
- Redeployment: Similar to rehosting, but implements cloud-native virtual machines to modernize the architecture. An efficient strategy, but the application is not cloud-native and will require manual maintenance.
- Repackaging: Organizations comfortable with containerization and infrastructure management can customize their application to benefit from cloud hosting. This method saves resources compared to more involved procedures but lacks the long-term benefits of refactoring.
- Refactoring: Requires developing a new cloud application to replace on premises tech. Requires significant resources but results in a modern, cloud-native application built for the long term.
- Repurchasing: Involves replacing legacy software with cloud-native applications. It can be cheaper than refactoring, but third-party applications may cause interoperability issues with the rest of your architecture.
- Retiring: If the cost of migrating legacy software is too substantial or isn’t worth the effort, it can be decommissioned. Organizations should be sure they’re not losing necessary functionality or data when retiring an application.
- Retaining: If you cannot currently migrate an application, but it is too important to retire, it can be retained for future use.
You should also determine what type of environment you’re migrating to. Four options are available:
- Public cloud: The least expensive option, but you’ll be sharing server space with other companies.
- Private cloud: Higher costs, but your organization will have a dedicated cloud server, which means increased security and compliance.
- Hybrid cloud: A combination of public and private cloud use that allows for increased flexibility but is more complex to set up and manage.
- Multi-cloud: Sets up a cloud environment across multiple cloud service providers. Difficult to monitor, but allows for maximum flexibility depending on application needs.
- ☐ Inventory the on-premises applications being prepared for migration.
Identify which elements you will migrate first. Migrating less critical or smaller systems will allow you to get a feel for the process before diving in fully.
- ☐ Assess the cost of migration.

Each migration method and storage solution comes with its own set of time considerations, costs, and drawbacks, and you’ll need to decide which way works best based on your allocated budget.
Each major cloud vendor provides a pricing calculator to help teams determine their needs and the associated costs.
- ☐ Create your migration timetable.
- ☐ Train staff on necessary skills for a successful migration.
Building the necessary skills to manage a successful migration requires investing time and resources in specialized training courses. Failure to properly learn how to complete the migration and operate within the cloud after migration can lead to significant downtime, failed transfers, lost data, decreased security and performance, and a host of other issues.
Each major cloud vendor provides its own training programs to ensure migration teams have the tools they need during and after the migration.
Execution
- ☐ Start with smaller pilot workloads to test your plan.
Migrating your most important or heavily-used applications is less than ideal, especially if this is your first cloud migration project. By starting small, and with less-critical workloads, you can test configurations and ensure smooth operation before moving on to critical data and applications.
Once you’ve confirmed your pilot workloads have been migrated successfully, adjust your plans based on these initial tests and outcomes. Continue to test until you get a proper handle on the process and migrations are largely successful.
- ☐ Begin the migration.
After you’re confident with your testing results, it’s time to start migrating in earnest. Complete migration work in phases so you can continuously analyze performance and ensure data and applications remain intact and functional.
Testing
- ☐ Review resource allocation and performance.
As systems come online, ensure that applications are functioning correctly and you’re not experiencing any slowdown in the new environment. If you’re seeing unusual performance spikes or heavy load, you’ll want to examine your configurations or migrated applications for any errors.
- ☐ Test functionality.
Ensure services are not impacted by migration and data remains intact. Test frequently before, during, and after each phase of migration.
- ☐ Switch over production to live cloud server.
You may want to do this all at once or roll out the switch in phases as systems come online in the cloud, depending on the migration size or the complexity of your application.
Go-Live
- ☐ Switch over interactive elements to users.
After the migration is complete and you have confirmed operation on the cloud server, it’s time to make your application fully interactive for the end user.
- ☐ Communicate progress with key stakeholders during the entire process.
Teams should inform stakeholders about the progress of the migration during every phase. Once complete, hold a post-mortem to discuss the results — what went right, what went wrong, areas for improvement, and KPI reports.
- ☐ Continue to monitor and optimize post-go-live.
Even when the migration is complete, there is always room to optimize and improve the end product. Plus, you’ll get a much more realistic view of real-world demands when your product is under public strain than in your testing environments. Monitor performance and make adjustments to ensure stability in the months following the migration.

About DuploCloud
As cloud adoption expands, we recognize that many organizations do not have the time, staff, or resources to make the leap themselves. Every business benefits from migrating to the cloud, even if they don’t have a dedicated DevOps team to manage that transition.
That’s why we developed DuploCloud: a DevOps-as-a-Service platform that automates the Infrastructure-as-Code framework construction, security protocol integration, and compliance enforcement necessary to build cloud-native applications at scale. Instead of writing thousands of lines of code to automate well-known operational workflows and standards — potentially introducing configuration or security errors — teams can focus on what they do best: building great applications.
Learn more about how DuploCloud reduces migration costs by 75% and speeds up your organization’s deployment times by a factor of ten. Contact us today for a personalized one-on-one walkthrough, and see DuploCloud in action for yourself.