Application migration to the cloud checklist: 15 steps to streamline your transition

Today, the need for cost reduction, scalability, and modernization drives many enterprises to explore cloud migration for their digital assets. In fact, most organizations are already dedicated to optimizing their cloud usage and migrating more workloads. But while migration offers substantial benefits, it comes with its challenges that demand careful planning. Whether you’re migrating a single app or multiple workloads, following a structured application migration to the cloud checklist is crucial to maximize the value of your endeavor and avoid common pitfalls. So, what are the key steps in the process? We’ve prepared a comprehensive step-by-step migration checklist to guide you.

15 steps for an application migration to the cloud checklist

Migrating an application to the cloud is a multi-step process with numerous cornerstones. When done correctly, it allows you to complete the transition within a reasonable timeframe and with minimal downtime. Let’s review 15 must-do points to help you achieve your migration goals.

1. Define migration objectives

Every successful plan starts with identifying your goals and defining ways to measure the outcomes. Here are three common scenarios and reasons for migrating an application to the cloud:

• You may be moving a single application to the cloud, since this is the only need your enterprise currently has;
• App migration is your proof of concept to test how cloud adoption could benefit your organization;
• You’re looking to slowly build up the necessary cloud skills across your organization, and you’re ready to take the first step.

After you determine the general migration goal, dive deeper and set clear objectives. Are you aiming to improve performance, reduce costs, enhance scalability, or all of the above? Although it may be difficult to set precise key performance indicators (KPIs) when it comes to the cloud, you can track general fluctuations in user satisfaction, response times, and cost savings. Monitoring these points will help assess your strategy’s effectiveness and uncover areas for improvement.

2. Ensure buy-in from stakeholders

Securing buy-in from stakeholders is crucial for successful migration. This process refers to engaging technical and business teams, as well as other parties, to gather insights, address concerns, and align goals. This is when you can ensure the upcoming migration accounts for all the stakeholders’ objectives and operational requirements.

3. Partner with a trusted migration consultant

One point you should include early in your cloud application migration checklist is partnering with a reliable cloud consultant. Engaging an expert at the start of your migration process helps avoid common challenges and pitfalls, ensuring every step is executed efficiently. Companies that offer cloud consulting services, like N-iX, bring invaluable expertise, from choosing the right migration strategy to optimizing your solution for scalability and cost-effectiveness.

Thoroughly evaluating your options is crucial at this stage. Here are several key points to look for when choosing a cloud migration partner:

• Proven experience with top cloud platforms like AWS, Azure, and Google Cloud Platform (GCP), as well as participation in their respective partnership programs. Relevant partner certifications may include Advanced Tier Services Partner for AWS, Microsoft Solutions Partner for Azure, and Google Cloud Platform Partner for GCP;
• Expertise in building hybrid and multi-cloud environments;
• A track record of executing complex application migrations;
• A strong understanding of security features and compliance requirements;
• Post-migration support and maintenance.

By employing the services of a cloud consultant at this stage, you set a solid foundation for migration and ensure experienced professionals handle the next steps in this checklist.

4. Perform a cloud readiness assessment

Having a clear understanding of your assets before making any changes helps avoid business disruptions, incompatibility issues, and numerous other obstacles during migration. Conduct a cloud readiness assessment, including cataloging your existing applications and dependencies. This audit will help you identify workloads suitable for migration and prioritize them based on business needs.

Here are key factors to evaluate:

• Application types: If you’re planning to migrate several applications, mission-critical and business-critical apps should be migrated last. Non-critical apps, on the other hand, can be used to test the new infrastructure without inflicting stalling operations.
• Architecture: Complex IT architectures often present significant challenges during cloud migration, especially when dealing with legacy systems. Only some legacy applications are suitable for migration without re-architecting. As part of your overall migration plan, creating a legacy application migration to the cloud checklist can help focus on assessing whether older applications can be moved effectively.
• Compliance requirements: When moving an application to the cloud, it’s crucial to consider what provisions you need to make to uphold regulatory compliance. For instance, you need to determine if there are any geographical restrictions on where specific data could reside.
• Network dependencies: Mapping app dependencies will help understand how your application interacts with other components across your current environment. Identify any dependencies that may require reconfiguration or testing during migration to maintain the integrity of operations.
• Platform and licensing: Review your existing software licenses and platform compatibility. This helps ensure your application will be supported in the target cloud environment, and you won’t have to worry about unexpected disruptions.

5. Choose the right cloud provider and cloud model

When you understand the main goals and tech requirements of your application transition, the next step in the cloud migration roadmap is to select suitable cloud providers. Assess cloud vendors based on platform features, scalability, support, and service-level agreements (SLAs). Here are the main three options:

• AWS offers unmatched scalability, a wide array of services, and a global infrastructure suitable for diverse workloads.
• Azure excels in seamless integration with Microsoft products and offers strong hybrid cloud capabilities.
• GCP stands out with its robust Big Data and Machine Learning capabilities, providing advanced analytics tools and high-performance computing.

Also, once you determine which applications to migrate, it’s time to think about the destination of your cloud journey. There are several options to choose from when it comes to cloud models: public, hybrid, or multi-cloud—the decision depends on your specific workloads and compliance requirements. Public clouds are cost-effective and scalable, while hybrid clouds provide greater control and security, making them fit for complex regulatory or operational requirements. Multi-cloud approaches combine the benefits of multiple environments, helping achieve high availability and flexibility.

6. Develop a migration strategy

At this point in your application migration to the cloud checklist, you’ve mapped your assets and goals thoroughly enough to create a migration strategy. Start with evaluating the scope of your initiative. If you’re migrating a single application as your only asset that needs cloud transformation, prioritize simplicity and speed. For building long-term cloud expertise, consider more gradual steps that allow your team to gain experience.

Validating your approach is another vital part of developing a migration strategy. Perform a benefit analysis to assess whether the proposed migration path addresses your defined objectives. If necessary, adjust your strategy to ensure it produces measurable results and effectively supports your organization’s broader cloud adoption journey. For instance, some monolithic applications may require modernization, such as adopting microservices or containerization. When this is the case, the effort and expenses required for migration may sometimes overshadow the benefits, and it would be more practical to keep the current setup.

7. Plan the migration

When the migration strategy is in place, the next step is to plan the migration process in detail. Here are several key areas to focus on:

Define the scope and timeline

Structure your migration in waves to minimize disruptions. If you’re migrating multiple applications, prioritize which to transfer first based on their business impact and complexity. Also, set clear milestones and deadlines to ensure a steady, organized process.

Prepare for data migration

Another vital step is to prepare for data migration. Start by identifying the data that needs to be transferred, including its volume, sensitivity, and dependencies. Then, develop a detailed plan for the migration process, ensuring the chosen approach aligns with the type of data and the target environment.

This process may include copying binary files, transferring datasets to the cloud, or migrating SQL and NoSQL databases. Depending on system complexity and requirements, you can opt for direct replication, database-specific migration utilities, or third-party migration services to ensure a seamless and secure data transfer.

Additionally, if your cloud application migration checklist doesn’t include backing up critical data, you gamble with potential data loss or corruption during migration. Always protect your data by creating and validating backups before introducing any substantial changes. This way, you can ensure a smooth recovery and minimize risks if anything goes wrong during the transition.

Create a disaster recovery plan

Even when migration is executed perfectly, no one is immune to unexpected hardware failures or network interruptions. Include creating a disaster recovery plan in your checklist to ensure business continuity. This plan should outline strategies for data restoration and automatic switching to a reliable backup—also known as failover—to protect you from data loss or corruption.

8. Ensure compliance and security

Regardless of whether your infrastructure is in the cloud or on-premises, you need to maintain strong security and comply with relevant data protection standards. In cloud environments, however, it may pose more of a challenge. Connecting multiple clouds, managing systems that run in different places, and exchanging data among them create openings for security vulnerabilities. So, how can you respond to these challenges?

When N-iX performs migration to the cloud, our engineers follow industry-best security practices to protect your applications in the new environment. Although the specific approach is tailored to your needs and architecture, here are several examples of what our teams implement:

• Encryption of data in transit and at rest;
• Identity and access management (IAM) frameworks;
• Monitoring and audit tools;
• Multi-factor authentication (MFA) to enhance access control;
• Network segmentation to isolate sensitive data.

Additionally, ensuring security is an ongoing process—threats evolve, and so should your shield against them. Conduct regular application security testing to identify weaknesses and address them in time. Besides enabling you to maintain a robust security posture, it also helps observe regulatory compliance. Depending on your industry, several regulatory frameworks and standards to pay attention to may include GDPR, PCI DSS, ISO 27001:2013, and ISO/IEC 27701:2019.

Maintaining compliance can get more complicated when migrating to the cloud, as data no longer resides just on your company’s servers. One option to address this is to identify your most sensitive data and store it on-premises, enabling you to have tighter control over confidential information while using the cloud for the rest of your workloads.

9. Create a cloud landing zone

Setting up a resilient, high-performance cloud environment is one of the cornerstones of application migration. During this step, your migration partner designs a landing zone to host your migrated workloads effectively, following the best practices depending on the chosen cloud provider. Here are several core components that need to be configured:

• Virtual networks for connectivity with cloud-hosted resources;
• Tools for connectivity with on-prem infrastructures that establish secure connections with local users and services;
• Storage accounts to store data securely;
• Compute instances to account for different workload requirements and achieve high performance;
• Identity and access management (IAM) solutions for robust security and compliance.

10. Prepare your workloads for migration

When migrating applications to the cloud, selecting a fitting workload transformation method is key. Your application migration to the cloud checklist should include choosing the most suitable approach based on your needs, application complexity, and business goals. Here at N-iX, our cloud experts mainly use the following methods:

• Rehosting: This is the easiest strategy that requires minimal changes and takes the least time, though it may not fully incorporate certain cloud benefits (such as greater scalability and performance).
• Refactoring: Although it’s one of the most complex options, it offers the highest optimization by reworking applications to benefit from cloud-native features.
• Revising: It involves using previous strategies and building upon them, applying more thorough architecture and code modifications.
• Rebuilding: This strategy involves creating a platform as a service (PaaS) solution and re-architecting the application from the ground up.
• Relocating: This involves moving from on-premises platforms to the cloud or from one cloud provider to another without rewriting code or requiring new hardware.
• Replatforming: This one is similar to rehosting, but it involves more adjustments, like modifying specific components to optimize for the cloud (e.g., switching to managed services).

11. Conduct a pilot migration and scale the process

One of the application migration best practices that N-iX engineers recommend is starting with a pilot migration. Migrating a non-critical application first helps you uncover potential challenges and hidden dependencies before moving larger, more complex workloads. It also allows you to fine-tune your process without impacting live systems.

After a successful pilot migration, the next step in the application cloud migration checklist is scaling operations and completing the migration. At N-iX, we conduct it by carefully following the created roadmap, monitoring real-time progress, and ensuring minimal downtime.

12. Test and validate post-migration

Validation is one of the crucial processes to perform post-migration. This is when you can ensure all the performance benchmarks, application functionality, and data integrity meet expectations. Conduct comprehensive testing to verify that migrated data is complete and free from duplication or format issues. Several types of testing you can run include functional, integration, performance, compliance, and security tests.

13. Optimize costs and performance

Optimizing your cloud environment post-migration should be on your application migration to the cloud checklist to ensure long-term efficiency and cost-effectiveness. You can improve resource allocation by using dynamic scaling, serverless options, and other tools included with your cloud platform.

Controlling expenses and improving overall cost management is also crucial. In fact, Flexera reveals that 84% of companies consider their primary challenge to be managing cloud spending. According to the same report, 51% of enterprises tackle this using FinOps teams to create and execute cloud cost optimization strategies. This is a solid approach to ensure you can maximize cost-efficiency while maintaining high performance.

14. Document the process and conduct employee training

Cloud migration transforms your business, and application documentation should reflect it. Revise the documentation and introduce the updated operational procedures, configurations, and system architecture parameters. Including this step in your application cloud migration checklist will help keep all records in order and simplify troubleshooting. Additionally, by documenting the migration process itself, you can streamline future migrations.

After completing the transfer to the cloud, many companies also discover knowledge gaps among their staff. Conduct employee training to prevent this challenge from stalling operations or even creating security issues. Tailor educational programs to different user groups, focusing on the new technologies your enterprise has implemented, workflow changes, and best practices for working with cloud resources. Workshops and knowledge-sharing events can also help your staff adapt faster.

15. Continuously monitor and maintain

After migration, effective monitoring and governance are essential to maintain your cloud environment. Although these processes overlap with optimization in certain areas, they enable more comprehensive oversight over your entire system. Integrate tools to enforce security policies, ensure compliance, and track performance. Here are several key areas to monitor:

• Application and infrastructure performance;
• Resource usage and costs;
• App response times;
• Access controls and user activity logs;
• Audit records;
• Security incidents and vulnerabilities;
• Compliance with data protection regulations and security policies.

Wrap up

A well-structured application migration to the cloud checklist is invaluable for guiding your cloud journey. Still, while having a roadmap ensures you stay on track, the migration process is complex, and enlisting experienced help is crucial to mitigating transition risks. Partnering with a trusted cloud consultant allows you to avoid common pitfalls and maximize the benefits of your cloud transformation.

Why should you partner with N-iX to streamline your application migration?

• With 21 years of experience in the market, N-iX is a global tech consulting company that delivers cloud projects for businesses across sectors, including fintech, retail, logistics, manufacturing, and other industries.
• N-iX is an AWS Advanced Tier Services Partner, a Microsoft Solutions Partner, and a Google Cloud Platform Partner, which enables us to enhance your migration strategy with industry best practices.
• Our team of 400 skilled cloud professionals has successfully completed over 30 on-premises-to-cloud and cloud-to-cloud migration projects in the last year and more than 200 cloud projects overall.
• In addition to cloud proficiency, our experts specialize in related areas, including DevOps, security services and auditing, CI/CD automation, and optimization.
• Being GDPR-compliant and ISO 9001-certified, N-iX treats the security of your application as the top priority, ensuring robust protection for your data.