With the expansiveness of organizational infrastructure, numerous applications, and large amounts of generated data, migrating to the cloud can be a long, expensive, and complicated undertaking. You may find that cloud migration projects are over budget, behind schedule, or deliver poor cloud ROI. So how can organizations minimize this risk and spend?
Using a cloud migration checklist and working with a cloud service provider can improve this process and ensure you don’t miss critical data or functionality on the other side. It also allows you to effectively evaluate why you want to migrate to the cloud, which applications make the most sense to move, and how to improve overall performance for a successful cloud deployment.
This article explains the types of cloud migration, the benefits and pitfalls, and what steps to include in your own cloud migration checklist.
Key takeaways:
Cloud migration and adoption can be a long, expensive, and complex process. Having a comprehensive checklist is essential for a successful migration.
Migrating to the cloud can bring cost savings, flexibility, scalability, and increased security. However, it also poses risks such as data loss, application incompatibility, and reduced performance.
The right cloud migration checklist includes steps for pre-project planning, application architecture evaluation, data backup and replication, infrastructure mapping, and testing.
A cloud migration checklist is a step-by-step document that helps guide you through the cloud migration process. It includes all the necessary phases of a cloud migration and outlines the actionable steps to take during the migration process. The checklist should also assign specific responsibilities to team members for each task, ensuring clear accountability throughout the process. With a migration checklist in hand, you can reduce the overall complexity of your cloud adoption journey—and ensure that no critical step gets overlooked.
An on-premises to cloud migration usually means the foundation of your infrastructure is changing from physical, on-premises data centers to the cloud, and requires your cloud migration checklist to account for every possible data source, physical servers, network configurations, and specialized tools or processes that can help migrate everything into the cloud.
A cloud-to-cloud migration, however, involves moving workloads between different cloud providers while staying in the cloud. For example, a company might migrate from AWS to DigitalOcean for simpler pricing and developer-friendly tools. Cloud-to-cloud migrations can still be time-consuming and require evaluation of overall compatibility, application capabilities, dependencies, and performance requirements. Your cloud migration checklist will still include steps for auditing, application mapping, disaster recovery and backup, but it will be more focused on how well your workloads can transfer between cloud providers instead of evaluating on-premises infrastructure or accounting for infrastructure upgrades.
Interested in a cloud migration? Use DigitalOcean’s Cloud Migration Readiness Framework to see how prepared you and your team are for a migration.
If you decide to work with a partner to perform a cloud migration, you can also learn about our migration services. We offer full end-to-end migration support—helping you and your team with planning, inventory, migration, infrastructure selection, and more.
The main types of cloud migration are rehost (lift and shift), replatform, repurchase, and refactor. The option you and your team select depends on your organization’s current application portfolio, workloads, data backup configurations, and any regulatory requirements. They are:
Rehost (lift and shift): Taking an on-premises workload and making minimal changes (if any) to the workload. This can also be true for cloud-to-cloud migration (though less common) where applications are moved on to the new cloud provider.
Replatform: Moving an application to the cloud without changing anything and integrating possible cloud services to increase the scalability, maintainability, and security of the application.
Repurchase: Not migrating your self-managed infrastructure and purchasing similar components and applications with cloud provider-managed services. This option isn’t necessarily an option for all companies and is workload-dependent.
Refactor: Partially or fully rewriting application source code to effectively run on cloud infrastructure without fundamentally changing the software’s features or functions.
In addition to choosing your migration strategy, decide if you and your team will move all applications and workloads to a public cloud, private cloud, hybrid cloud, or multi-cloud configuration.
During the evaluation process, you might also realize that not every application needs to migrate to the cloud. This leaves you with two options:
Retain: Keeping specific applications (especially those important to the business) on-premises instead of moving them to the cloud. This could be for performance concerns, architecture incompatibility, or compliance requirements.
Retire: Decommission the application and archive any valuable data or information.
Many companies decide to perform a cloud-to-cloud migration to reduce costs, improve performance in key regions, or avoid getting locked into a single vendor’s ecosystem. The main benefits of this type of migration include:
Improved cost effectiveness: Depending on cloud provider pricing, these migration types can save costs over time, access new pricing tiers, and gain more billing flexibility. This removes the need to rely on hyperscale cloud providers, which can increase overall complexity and unreliable pricing.
Performance improvements: Migrating clouds—and cloud providers—can open up different types of regional availability, available computing hardware, or the latest technology for cloud infrastructure.
Reduced vendor lock-in and multi-cloud adoption: Some cloud-to-cloud migrations focus on migrating certain workloads or projects instead of the entirety of an organization’s applications and data. This type of migration means the organization doesn’t have to rely on one cloud provider to host all its infrastructure and can much more easily adopt a multi-cloud strategy.
Cloud migrations require extensive planning, can be costly, and might require infrastructure downtime. Even so, there are several compelling reasons to pursue a shift to the cloud:
Increased flexibility and scalability: Cloud resources are more elastic than provisioned, on-premises infrastructure. This means you can grow or shrink the amount of cloud computing power to match workload demands as they change throughout the year.
Cost savings: Cloud providers charge you just for the resources you use with pay-as-you-go pricing, instead of you and your team paying for overprovisioned infrastructure that is seldom used.
Greater automation capabilities: You can centralize cloud computing management or offload it completely to a cloud provider. Should you self-manage your cloud resources, cloud management platforms can help you schedule and automate regular security updates, software updates, data backup frequency, and more.
Security and compliance: Cloud platforms integrate security measures such as data protection, access controls like RBAC, advanced encryption, continuous monitoring, as well as security analytics and reporting. You can also integrate encryption and uptime monitoring features for industry-specific compliance requirements such as HIPAA, PCI-DSS, and ISO27001.
Backup and recovery: You can set cloud data to be automatically backed up at regular intervals and easily distribute it across multiple geographical regions for increased redundancy. Additionally, cloud providers provide built-in and one-click backup and recovery features that ensure business continuity and reduce potential downtime.
Beyond the potential considerations of overall cost, adoption and training, cloud provider selection, and planning, several cloud migration risks should be avoided to see a positive cloud ROI:
Lack of workload inventory and dependency review: If you don’t know what your full application inventory looks like or how all the applications and workloads are connected, it can cause migration gaps, workload disruptions, and missing functionalities.
Inadequate validation testing before production cutover: Testing is essential to the migration process and ensures a functional cloud environment. Minimal or rushed testing doesn’t provide valuable feedback and can lead to issues in the new production environment.
Poor rollback or backup strategies: Not having effective rollback versions or knowing what backup options are available with cloud platforms means potentially missing or lost data during the migration or ineffective backup workflows post-migration.
Underestimating configuration compatibility: Depending on the infrastructure you’re migrating from, not all applications are designed to run or perform well in the cloud. Some might also not have a one-to-one cloud application equivalent. This can result in poor or non-existent application performance after the migration.
Increased complexity with multi-cloud or hybrid cloud strategy: Managing workloads across multiple cloud providers introduces additional challenges around data synchronization, security policies, and vendor-specific tools, making migrations more difficult to plan and execute successfully.
A cloud migration checklist can be split up into seven main categories that cover pre-migration assessment, application evaluation, compatibility considerations, data migration, testing, and post-migration evaluation.
A successful migration begins with a thorough assessment, planning, and goal mapping. This stage involves defining migration goals, evaluating and mapping out your infrastructure, selecting a cloud provider (if you’re going with a managed service), and assembling a migration team. At the end of this phase, you and your team should know why this cloud migration is taking place, have a comprehensive picture of your applications and workloads, know your cloud provider or cloud management team, and have a cloud migration team in place. For example, you should know your specific cost reduction targets, which team members will handle database migrations versus application deployments, and the exact sequence for moving interdependent systems.
Actions include:
Consider the “why” of your cloud migration. Is it to decrease costs? Improve reliability, flexibility, or scalability? Or some other business reasons?
Align this initiative with business goals. This could be accelerating time to market, increasing market share, or supporting innovation.
Define measurable success metrics. These could be reduced overall costs, faster application response time, or increased customer satisfaction and engagement.
Identify project timelines and account for potential roadblocks throughout the project.
This is where you’ll get deeper into the technical details of the applications themselves; not all applications are suited or function well in the cloud. You should evaluate architecture compatibility with cloud infrastructure, modification requirements, resource transition requirements, application dependencies, connected data sources, and API integrations. This stage will help you figure out what steps you need to take to migrate applications and what types of application architectures you want to have in your new cloud configuration.
Actions include:
Perform an application inventory—complete with documentation and an architecture diagram.
Analyze historical performance data to gain a sense of what cloud resources you will need.
Run a security and compliance evaluation.
Determine application interdependencies and architecture compatibility.
Identify which parts to rebuild, migrate, or repurchase.
Moving data is a whole project in itself and also requires evaluation in planning. This step is where you’ll spend time and identify what data you want to move, including databases, files, configurations, user-generated data, and any other mission-critical organizational data sources. Then you’ll decide on how to move it: offline, online, or hybrid. What you decide will depend on data volume, project complexity, security regulations, data handling requirements, and downtime tolerance. These decisions will leave you with a plan on how you’ll move your data when the time comes.
Actions include:
Gather data from all necessary sources across your organization
Figure out what configuration files need to be retained.
Locate your static code and figure out if it can be moved in advance.
Locate your stateful data and identify which of it is the most complex to migrate.
Determine how long it will take to move all your data to your new cloud environment.
Set up disaster recovery and backup measures.
Beyond the applications, you’ll also want to consider how your current infrastructure (servers, networks, storage, and security systems) can support new cloud systems. This includes identifying any gaps between current and cloud-ready infrastructure and ensuring the systems that will host your cloud applications and workloads are scalable and provide high performance levels. Doing this infrastructure evaluation will help you decide if you will need to upgrade hardware or if you want to move to a managed cloud provider.
Actions include:
Identify computing hardware requirements for your new cloud setup.
Assess your current infrastructure and evaluate its performance capabilities.
Figure out where your current infrastructure and new cloud infrastructure overlap—and where there are discrepancies.
Research any necessary hardware upgrades and figure out a timeline for implementation.
Establish a governance framework that outlines best practices for cloud operations, security requirements, data handling guidelines, and compliance protocols.
It’s necessary to test before you actually move your infrastructure to avoid integration headaches and performance issues. This phase should involve:
Functional testing: Evaluate the applications, systems, and workloads perform as expected, do what they’re supposed to, and have all critical functions.
Performance testing: Simulate how your infrastructure can perform under minimal and heavy use or specific use cases. Run load testing, stress testing, and endurance testing to validate that your infrastructure and cloud setup can properly load balance, support high-performance conditions, and is designed for long-term use.
Security and compliance: Assess potential vulnerabilities, establish access control, integrate industry and federal/state-specific regulation requirements, and run security scans.
Performing these tests will help you understand how ready you and your team are to perform your cloud migration and get a sense of how your applications and workloads will run once in the cloud.
Actions include:
Setup a test environment that can effectively mimic your new cloud environment.
Run data integrity testing to verify accurate migration and consistency with source data.
Evaluate application performance in the cloud to ensure your systems can support desired benchmarks and can handle high usage peaks and run well over time.
Complete penetration testing, vulnerability scanning, and security audits.
Integrate user acceptance testing to validate that the new setup meets requirements and provides a positive user experience.
Test failover and recovery procedures to make sure they function properly and provide a backup should migration issues occur.
By now, you’ve figured out why your organization is migrating to the cloud and have evaluated your infrastructure, application architecture, data requirements, and run the necessary tests. It’s time to perform the actual cloud migration. Be sure that your new system is set to host your infrastructure, and important parties (internal and external) are informed of potential downtime or service disruptions.
This is where you perform one last data synchronization to ensure all necessary data, applications, and system changes are accounted for. Then, you update DNS records and network configurations to send traffic to your new cloud environment. These two tasks (along with all your other planning) will ensure you’re ready to complete the migration itself.
Actions include:
Perform a final data synchronization to ensure there is an up-to-date version of the environment you want to migrate.
Update DNS records and network configurations to reroute traffic to your cloud setup.
Notify customer facing teams of upcoming downtime and what this means for their workflows.
Notify customers of upcoming downtime through email, app notifications, or status pages.
After you’ve redirected and moved your applications, workloads, and data to the cloud, monitor your cloud setup for performance and resource allocation. This enables you to ensure everything is running smoothly, spot potential problems, implement cloud provider tools, and run security checks. From the operational perspective, you will also want to evaluate what was successful about the project, what was challenging, and if there are any outstanding issues to address.
Actions include:
Monitor applications for performance bottlenecks, missing functionality, security vulnerabilities, and anomalies.
Continue to optimize your cloud environment for performance and implement cloud monitoring tools.
Create a plan for regular security audits and vulnerability assessments.
Set up a software maintenance schedule to implement updates.
Review your cloud spend over time and find cloud cost optimization opportunities.
Host post-mortem meetings to assess the overall success of your cloud migration.
What are cloud migration pros and cons?
Migrating to the cloud can bring your team and organization more infrastructure flexibility, scalability, increased security features, broader infrastructure accessibility, update automation, and cost savings. However, cloud migration can also be time-consuming, can lead to vendor lock-in, raise some security risks, and come with legal considerations.
What are the key steps in a cloud migration checklist?
The key steps of a cloud migration include a pre-migration assessment to evaluate current infrastructure and KPIs, followed by an assessment of application suitability, architecture, and dependencies. Then you complete the data and infrastructure migration.
How do I ensure no data is lost during migration?
To ensure you don’t lose any data during a cloud migration, perform a comprehensive pre-migration audit, extensively back up the data you want to migrate, assign point persons for sensitive or mission-critical data, and run testing and validation before migration to ensure planned processes can effectively move data.
What tools help automate cloud migration?
Most cloud providers have their own specific tools that can help you with cloud migration automation. The tools you use will also depend on the type of cloud migration you are doing and your application architecture.
Should I use a hybrid or full cloud strategy?
Whether you use a hybrid or full cloud strategy will depend on your current infrastructure setup, application architecture, and post-migration environment requirements. Hybrid cloud provides flexibility and can support multiple types of applications across data centers, public, and private clouds. A full cloud strategy can be cost-effective and more scalable. Discuss this with your cloud service provider, and they can help you decide which option best suits your needs.
Join the growing number of developers, startups, and digital native enterprises migrating to DigitalOcean’s cloud platform to unlock greater performance, simplified operations, and cost efficiency. Whether you’re looking to reduce your cloud spend or streamline complex to the cloud. Here’s how:
End-to-end migration support: Our dedicated team of solution architects works directly with you to plan, execute, and validate your cloud migration—at no additional cost. From virtual machines and Kubernetes to databases and storage, we tailor every migration for minimal disruption and maximum success.
Partner network and knowledge base: DigitalOcean partners with cloud migration experts like CTO.ai, Slower.ai, Crafty Penguins, Stack, Webbar, and GlobalDots to support startups who are considering cloud migration. These partners can provide you with the tools and expertise necessary to migrate your cloud infrastructure successfully.
Education and on-going monitoring: From your initial planning call through 30-day post-migration support, we offer dedicated Slack channels, clear escalation paths, and optional health checks with cost tuning. You’ll also receive hands-on training, knowledge transfer, and DevOps compatibility checks to ensure a smooth transition.
Experience with legacy infrastructure migrations: Vivid Racing realized they had to upgrade their infrastructure and move to the cloud. With a lift-and-shift cloud migration to DigitalOcean and AquaZeel, the team immediately achieved approximately 35% cost savings while improving performance, scalability, and operational efficiency.
Book your free migration consultation today.
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