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Cloud Services Migration Checklist

Hard 20 items · 1 day
testuser's avatar
testuser Published 4 weeks ago

This checklist guides teams through a complete cloud migration, from inventory and dependency mapping to cutover and legacy decommission. It’s for IT managers, cloud engineers, and project leads planning a production migration who need a practical, step-by-step plan.

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  1. Audit all applications and infrastructure assets — List servers, databases, services, endpoints, and owners.
  2. Record versions, OS, middleware, licenses, and endpoints — Capture IPs, ports, and contact owners for each item.
  3. Classify data by sensitivity, compliance, and retention — Tag data as public, confidential, or regulated and note retention rules.
  4. Assign data owners and handling rules — Identify who approves access and manages retention.
  5. Map application dependencies and data flows — Document integrations, queues, and external API connections.
  6. Choose migration strategy per workload (rehost/refactor/replatform/replace) — Pick the least-risk, most-cost-effective approach for each app.
  7. Evaluate and shortlist cloud providers, regions, and services — Compare SLAs, available services, and region compliance needs.
  8. Estimate migration and ongoing costs (TCO) and run cost models — Include data egress, licensing, management, and staffing costs.
  9. Design target cloud architecture, network, and connectivity — Define VPCs, subnets, routing, peering, and connectivity methods.
  10. Define security controls: IAM, encryption, network rules, and logging — Map least-privilege roles, KMS keys, and centralized logging.
  11. Plan backup, recovery, and rollback procedures — Document recovery points, rollback triggers, and acceptance tests.
  12. Define RTO and RPO targets per application
  13. Configure automated backups and test restore procedures — Verify restore scripts and backup integrity regularly.
  14. Provision a staging environment mirroring production — Match architecture, network, and representative data subsets.
  15. Migrate a pilot workload to staging and validate — Choose a representative app and dataset for the pilot.
  16. Run functional, performance, and failover tests in staging — Include load, latency, and resilience checks under real conditions.
  17. Optimize performance and costs based on test results — Right-size compute, adjust storage tiers, and tune autoscaling.
  18. Create detailed cutover and rollback plan with timelines — List DNS changes, final sync steps, and exact rollback criteria.
  19. Schedule migration window, notify stakeholders, and enforce change freeze — Confirm staffing, runbooks, and communication channels.
  20. Execute cutover, monitor systems, validate transactions, and decommission legacy systems — Follow runbooks, monitor health dashboards, then reclaim resources and update docs.
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