Migrating workloads to the public cloud remains one of the most complex infrastructure challenges facing enterprise IT teams. Despite the widespread enthusiasm for platforms such as Amazon Web Services (AWS) and Microsoft Azure, a poorly planned migration can result in downtime, data loss, regulatory penalties, and unexpected cost overruns. A structured, step-by-step migration strategy is not optional—it is essential.
Why Cloud Migration Is Still Difficult
The difficulty of moving workloads to the cloud depends on several interconnected factors: the urgency of the migration timeline, the volume of data being moved, and the architectural complexity of the services involved. Most organisations also operate within fixed budgets and deadlines, meaning that a failed or delayed migration carries direct financial consequences.
Even after a successful migration, challenges do not disappear. Fragmented visibility, cloud outages, and vendor lock-in are persistent operational concerns. Understanding these risks before you start is the first step toward avoiding them.
Key Questions to Answer Before You Migrate
Before committing time, budget, and resources to a cloud migration, every organisation should honestly answer the following questions:
- How do I ensure a successful migration? Without a way to validate that your workloads will function correctly in the target cloud environment, you are leaving the outcome to chance. A pre-migration testing strategy is non-negotiable.
- Will I lose visibility into my workloads once they are in the cloud? Adding a public cloud to an existing multi-vendor, multi-platform environment increases operational fragmentation and reduces real-time visibility into IT health—making it harder to meet service continuity objectives such as recovery time objectives (RTOs) and recovery point objectives (RPOs).
- How resilient is the public cloud? No cloud platform is completely immune to outages. Human error, network failures, and regional disruptions can bring even the largest providers offline, impacting revenue, productivity, and reputation.
- Will I be locked in? Most cloud vendors provide free native tools to migrate into their platform but make it deliberately harder to move out. If business priorities shift, you need the flexibility to repatriate workloads to on-premises infrastructure or move them to a different cloud.
Four Key Steps to a Successful Cloud Migration Strategy
Addressing these concerns requires a structured approach. The following four steps form the foundation of a robust, low-risk cloud migration strategy.
Step 1: Test and Re-Test Before You Migrate
A successful migration begins long before the actual cutover. Just as disaster recovery processes require regular testing to prove that failover procedures work, a migration strategy requires pre-flight validation to confirm that your workloads will run correctly in the cloud after the move.
An effective pre-migration test typically involves:
- Replicating business data to the cloud — establishing a live data copy in the target environment.
- Creating a point-in-time snapshot of the replicated data — this snapshot is attached to a test compute instance rather than connecting directly to the live replication stream, which could cause production issues.
- Bringing the test workload online — validating that applications, dependencies, and integrations all function as expected in the cloud environment.
- Automating and repeating the test — IT environments change constantly. Configuration drift between test runs can invalidate earlier results. Automated, repeatable testing ensures that the migration plan reflects the current state of your infrastructure right up to the moment of cutover.
The ability to perform non-disruptive, automated migration tests without impacting production systems is a key differentiator between a controlled migration and a high-risk one.
Step 2: Maintain Visibility Into Business IT Health
Once workloads are distributed across on-premises data centres, private clouds, and one or more public clouds, unified visibility becomes significantly harder to achieve. Many organisations continue to run legacy and mission-critical workloads on-premises even as they expand into the cloud, resulting in a fragmented operational picture.
The consequences of poor visibility include:
- Inability to make informed, real-time business decisions
- Difficulty meeting internal and external compliance requirements
- Increased operational expenditure from managing separate toolsets for on-premises and cloud environments
- Higher risk of undetected failures leading to downtime
The goal is a single, unified view of IT health that spans all environments. This enables operations teams to monitor service level objectives, detect anomalies early, and respond quickly regardless of where a workload is running.
Step 3: Build a Resiliency Safeguard for Cloud Workloads
Cloud providers operate at massive scale, but outages still happen. When they do, the impact on your business is your responsibility—not your provider’s. Cloud service agreements typically include service level commitments, but SLA credits rarely compensate for lost revenue, damaged customer relationships, or regulatory fines.
Organisations in regulated industries—particularly financial services, banking, and healthcare—face additional exposure, as business continuity regulations may impose penalties for downtime of critical IT services regardless of whether the cause was a third-party cloud outage.
An effective resiliency strategy for public cloud workloads should go beyond the basic redundancy options built into cloud platforms. Key capabilities to look for include:
- Real-time outage alerting — immediate notification when an incident is detected, not after it has already impacted users.
- Automated failover — the ability to shift workloads to another availability zone, region, or back to on-premises infrastructure with minimal manual intervention.
- Recovery validation — regular, automated testing of failover procedures so you know they will work when needed.
Step 4: Plan for Migration Out of the Cloud
Vendor lock-in consistently ranks among the top concerns organisations cite about public cloud adoption. Cloud platform vendors understandably want to retain customers, and their free native migration tools are typically designed to make it easy to move workloads in rather than out.
Business priorities change over time. Regulatory requirements shift. Mergers, acquisitions, and cost pressures can all create scenarios where repatriating workloads to on-premises infrastructure—or moving them to a different cloud provider—becomes the right decision. Organisations that have not planned for this scenario may find themselves unable to act quickly when the need arises.
Avoiding lock-in requires:
- Using cloud-agnostic data formats and APIs wherever possible
- Maintaining the capability to replicate data back to on-premises or to an alternative cloud
- Selecting migration and resiliency tools that support multi-cloud and hybrid-cloud mobility, not just a single vendor’s platform
- Periodically testing egress procedures to confirm that workloads can actually be moved
Putting It All Together: A Resilient, Flexible Migration Approach
The four steps above are mutually reinforcing. Pre-migration testing reduces the risk of failure at cutover. Ongoing visibility allows you to detect and respond to problems after the migration. Resiliency safeguards protect the business from outages outside your control. And planning for workload mobility ensures you are never permanently committed to a single provider.
Organisations that treat cloud migration as a one-time project rather than an ongoing operational discipline typically encounter the most difficulty. Those that invest in testing, observability, resiliency, and portability from the outset are consistently better positioned to deliver migrations that meet both technical and business objectives.
Vendor Context
This article is based on a piece originally published on itweb.co.za and informed by content from Veritas Technologies, whose Resiliency Platform and CloudMobility products are designed to address the migration testing, visibility, resiliency, and portability challenges described above. The four-step framework, however, represents broadly applicable cloud migration best practice rather than guidance specific to any single vendor’s solution.