Cloud migration strategy: your 2025 guide
Cloud migration isn't just a lift-and-shift operation. It's a complex engineering challenge that requires careful planning, robust architecture decisions, and a deep understanding of your current infrastructure.
The numbers speak for themselves: the global cloud computing market, valued at $602.31 billion in 2023, is projected to grow at a CAGR of 21.2% through 2030. This explosive growth isn't surprising when you consider the tangible benefits: horizontal scalability, operational cost optimization, and the agility to deploy anywhere in minutes instead of months. However, companies often have to manage data security, minimize production downtime, control cloud costs, and maintain system reliability throughout the cloud migration process.
This guide will walk you through building a comprehensive cloud migration strategy, from initial assessment to post-migration optimization. We'll cover practical approaches to common migration challenges and best practices.
What is a cloud migration strategy?
A cloud migration strategy is a comprehensive technical framework that guides how your organization transitions its applications, data, and infrastructure to the cloud. Think of it as your system architecture document, deployment playbook, and disaster recovery plan rolled into one, but focused specifically on migration.
At its core, a successful migration plan builds upon solid engineering practices including automated testing, CI/CD pipelines, monitoring, and security. Every change should be tested and validated, and they should be automated and standardized so processes can be repeated. Engineering excellence ensures that stakeholders can work efficiently with proper tooling.
Guardrails for technical decisions can help DevOps teams make decisions about which workloads to migrate to the cloud first, choose appropriate migration patterns for apps, and define rollback procedures when things don't go as planned.
Types of cloud migration strategies: the 7 Rs
The migration strategy that's best for your business will depend on your technical maturity, resource constraints, business priorities, and risk tolerance. A startup might opt for a complete refactoring to build cloud-native applications from the ground up, whereas a large enterprise with legacy systems might need a more conservative lift-and-shift approach to minimize disruption.
While every migration is unique, most fall into patterns known as the "7 Rs" of cloud migration. Each pattern requires distinct levels of engineering effort and offers different benefits:
Refactoring (re-architecting)
Refactoring is a more comprehensive approach to cloud migration, with significant architectural changes and well-suited for applications that need better scalability or performance improvements. Teams looking to adopt microservices architecture often choose this path to break down applications into more manageable, independently deployable services. While refactoring requires more initial investment in time and resources, it typically yields better long-term results for application performance, scalability, and maintainability.
Replatforming (lift, tinker, and shift)
Replatforming strikes a balance between rehosting and refactoring. Teams looking to reduce operational overhead often choose this strategy, and it's well-suited for applications that can benefit from managed services without requiring a complete redesign. It's an effective way to gain some cloud benefits with selective optimizations during the migration process while keeping the core architecture intact.
Repurchasing (drop and shop)
Sometimes the most efficient path forward is to abandon an existing application in favor of a cloud-native SaaS solution. This strategy, often called "drop and shop," involves moving from legacy applications to third-party SaaS platforms, such as from on-premises CRM systems to Salesforce or from legacy email servers to Google Workspace.
Rehosting (lift and shift)
Rehosting, commonly known as "lift and shift," is the most straightforward migration approach. This strategy involves moving applications and data to the cloud with minimal modifications to the existing architecture. It's particularly effective for legacy applications with minimal cloud-native requirements and teams facing immediate migration deadlines.
Organizations often choose this approach when dealing with applications that have complex dependencies that would be difficult or risky to refactor. While rehosting may not fully leverage cloud-native capabilities, it offers a faster migration path and can be a stepping stone for future optimizations.
Relocating
Relocating, also known as rehosting at the hypervisor level, involves moving infrastructure to the cloud with minimal changes but at a deeper level than standard rehosting. This typically involves using specialized tools to move entire virtual machines, operating systems, and associated data from on-premises hypervisors to cloud-based ones. The difference with rehosting is this approach operates at the hypervisor level rather than the application level.
Retaining (hybrid)
Some applications may need to remain in their existing environments due to regulatory requirements, complex legacy dependencies, or specific performance needs. Retaining involves identifying which applications should use on-premises infrastructure while implementing a hybrid cloud strategy that allows these systems to interact with cloud services when necessary.
Retiring
Not every application needs to make the journey to the cloud. Retiring involves identifying and decommissioning applications that are no longer providing business value or have been replaced by other solutions. This can significantly reduce your infrastructure footprint and operational costs.
5 steps to build a cloud migration strategy
A successful cloud migration requires diligent planning and execution, with each phase building upon the previous one. While every organization's journey is unique, these steps form the backbone of any successful migration strategy.
Step 1: Assess current infrastructure and set goals
Audit your infrastructure, applications, and dependencies, and map out the current state of your systems, including performance baselines, resource utilization patterns, and interdependencies between different components. Document your technical debt, compliance requirements, and any legacy systems that may require special handling. Beyond the technical inventory, define clear, measurable goals that align with broader business objectives.
Step 2: Identify optimal cloud providers and models
Selecting the right cloud provider and service models isn't just about comparing pricing tables. Consider factors like geographic availability of data centers and edge locations and native services that align with your technical requirements. The cloud provider should integrate with your existing toolchain and have compliance certifications relevant to your industry.
Remember that different applications might benefit from different cloud models. Some workloads might be best suited for Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS), while others could leverage Platform as a Service (PaaS) to reduce operational overhead.
Step 3: Develop a detailed migration roadmap
Your migration roadmap should break down the transition into manageable phases, with clear dependencies and milestones. Prioritize applications based on business impact, technical complexity, and risk level. Consider starting with non-critical applications to build team expertise and refine your processes before tackling more complex systems.
The roadmap should include sequencing of application migrations, resource allocation and team responsibilities, testing and validation requirements, communication plans, and contingency plans and rollback procedures.
Step 4: Ensure data security and compliance
Data security cannot be an afterthought in cloud migration. Implement robust security measures that protect your data during and after the migration. Encrypt data in transit and at rest, and implement proper access controls and authentication mechanisms. Set up network security groups and firewalls, and establish monitoring and alerting for security risks and events.
Step 5: Pilot migration and evaluate
Before committing to a full-scale migration, conduct pilot migrations with select applications. These serve as proof of concepts and learning opportunities for your team. Monitor the pilot migrations closely, measuring performance, costs, and user experience. Insights from the pilot will help you refine your approach and update your migration playbook.
Best practices for cloud migration
Successful cloud migrations rely on proven practices that minimize risks and optimize outcomes. Here are key strategies that should guide your migration journey:
Prioritize data security and compliance
Build security into your cloud migration process from day one. Implement encryption, access controls, and monitoring tools before moving sensitive data. Regular security audits and compliance checks should be part of your continuous integration pipeline. Document your security measures and maintain clear audit trails for compliance purposes.
Optimize cost-effective budgeting
Cloud costs can quickly spiral without proper governance. Implement tagging strategies, budgeting tools, and alerts to track spending. Right-size your resources based on actual usage patterns.
Establish strong governance
Create clear policies and procedures for cloud resource management. Start with establishing consistent resource naming conventions that make assets easily identifiable and manageable. Implement comprehensive access management policies to control who can create, modify, and delete cloud resources. Define configuration standards to ensure all cloud resources meet your organization's requirements for security, performance, and cost optimization. Finally, implement change management procedures to control how and when modifications are made to your cloud environment.
Train and prepare teams
Invest in upskilling your team on cloud technologies and best practices. Teams need comprehensive training in cloud architecture patterns to design scalable and resilient systems. They must understand Infrastructure as Code and cloud-native development practices to build applications that fully leverage cloud capabilities.
Continuously monitor and optimize performance
Set up comprehensive monitoring and observability solutions before migration begins. Track key metrics like application performance, resource utilization, and user experience. Use this data to identify optimization opportunities and address issues proactively.
Implement an internal developer portal
A well-designed internal developer portal can significantly streamline your cloud migration by providing standardized templates and tools, documentation, self-service capabilities, and service catalogs.
Measuring the success of cloud migration
Measuring your cloud migration means using scorecards and KPIs to track the performance post-migration to understand the impact. A comprehensive evaluation framework can help ensure you're achieving your intended objectives and identify areas for optimization.
Cost savings and ROI
Track the direct and indirect financial impacts of your cloud migration, and look beyond simple infrastructure costs to understand the total economic impact. Establish a baseline by comparing pre- and post-migration infrastructure costs. Calculate the time saved through automation and improved processes, and assess the impact on development velocity to understand how the cloud environment affects your team's productivity.
Remember that initial costs might increase during the transition period before you see long-term savings.
System performance and uptime
Track application response times across different regions to ensure consistent user experience. Monitor system availability, uptime, error rates, and failure recovery times. Keep a close eye on API performance and latency to maintain smooth service integration. Compare these metrics against your pre-migration baseline to ensure the cloud environment delivers the expected performance improvements.
User adoption and productivity
The success of your migration depends heavily on how well it serves both external customers and internal teams. Monitor developer productivity metrics to understand how the cloud environment impacts your engineering efficiency. Track deployment frequency and success rates to measure the effectiveness of your continuous delivery pipeline. Measure code commit to production lead time to evaluate your delivery pipeline's efficiency. Track customer satisfaction scores to gauge the impact on end-user experience, and analyze support ticket volumes and resolution times to understand how the migration affects your operational efficiency.
Security incidents and compliance audits
Monitor your security posture and compliance status continuously throughout and after the migration. Track security incident frequency and severity, and measure the time to detect and respond to security events. Conduct regular vulnerability assessment scores to identify and address potential security weaknesses.
Migrate faster with Cortex
When undertaking a transition, having the right cloud migration tools and support can significantly impact your success. Thousands of world-class engineering teams rely on Cortex to streamline their cloud migrations and maintain high engineering standards.
Automated scorecards: Cortex's Scorecards allow organizations to establish and enforce standards for cloud readiness and migration progress. They automatically assess services against defined criteria and offer actionable insights to ensure compliance and track the effectiveness of migration efforts.
Comprehensive integrations: By integrating with a wide array of tools—including AWS, Azure, and various CI/CD platforms—Cortex consolidates data from multiple sources. This gives you insights into existing infrastructure and streamlines the transition process.
Engineering intelligence: With Eng Intelligence, Cortex aggregates data from various stages of the software development lifecycle to provide metrics on deployment frequency, lead time, and incident rates. This helps teams identify bottlenecks and measure the impact of cloud migration on overall engineering productivity.
Developer self-service tools: Tools like Scaffolder and Actions help developers create standardized templates and automate routine tasks. This reduces manual effort during migration, ensures consistency across services, and accelerates cloud adoption.
To learn more about Cortex, book a demo.
