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Five cloud-migration mistakes, and how to avoid them
The cloud is an extraordinary platform and a merciless amplifier. Move a well-run system and it gets better. Move a mess and you get a faster, more expensive mess.
The mistakes we see most
- Lifting and shifting everything. Some workloads should move as-is; some should be re-platformed; some should be retired. Treating them all the same wastes money and opportunity.
- Ignoring cost until the first bill. Architecture decisions are cost decisions. Design for both from day one.
- Forgetting the network. Latency, egress charges and connectivity back to on-prem systems sink more migrations than compute ever does.
- Skipping the landing zone. Without a well-governed foundation โ identity, guardrails, tagging โ you are building on sand.
- Big-bang cutovers. Move in waves, prove each one, and keep a tested path back.
The principle: migrate the architecture, not just the servers. The goal is a system that is better in the cloud, not merely present in it.
Done with discipline, a migration is the best chance you will get to pay down years of technical debt. Done in a hurry, it is the fastest way to move that debt somewhere more expensive.