Why migrations stall
Most enterprise cloud programmes don't fail at the technical layer — they fail at the strategy layer. Teams try to lift-and-shift everything, ignore landing-zone governance, and discover cost overruns six months in.
The four-phase framework
- Assess — inventory applications, map dependencies, score criticality.
- Foundation — build a governed landing zone with identity, networking, and security baselines.
- Migrate — sequence by risk: rehost first, refactor where value is clear, retain what should stay.
- Optimise — FinOps tagging, rightsizing, and automation post-cutover.
Start with the landing zone
A well-designed landing zone is non-negotiable. It gives you identity federation, network segmentation, logging, and policy guardrails before the first workload lands. Without it, every migration becomes a bespoke snowflake.
Sequence by risk, not by enthusiasm
Migrate the lowest-risk, highest-learning workloads first. The goal of early waves is to validate your landing zone, your CI/CD, and your runbooks — not to chase the hardest workload.
Migration is not a project. It is a platform you build once and reuse for every wave that follows.
FinOps from day one
Tag everything at provision time, enforce budgets, and set up rightsizing recommendations early. The cost surprises happen to teams that treat FinOps as a phase six months after go-live.