Cloud Services Migration Checklist

20 items · Cloud Migration · Hard difficulty · 1 day

Practical, end-to-end checklist for planning and executing a cloud migration.

• Audit all applications and infrastructure assets

  List servers, databases, services, endpoints, and owners.

• Record versions, OS, middleware, licenses, and endpoints

  Capture IPs, ports, and contact owners for each item.

• Classify data by sensitivity, compliance, and retention

  Tag data as public, confidential, or regulated and note retention rules.

• Assign data owners and handling rules

  Identify who approves access and manages retention.

• Map application dependencies and data flows

  Document integrations, queues, and external API connections.

• Choose migration strategy per workload (rehost/refactor/replatform/replace)

  Pick the least-risk, most-cost-effective approach for each app.

• Evaluate and shortlist cloud providers, regions, and services

  Compare SLAs, available services, and region compliance needs.

• Estimate migration and ongoing costs (TCO) and run cost models

  Include data egress, licensing, management, and staffing costs.

• Design target cloud architecture, network, and connectivity

  Define VPCs, subnets, routing, peering, and connectivity methods.

• Define security controls: IAM, encryption, network rules, and logging

  Map least-privilege roles, KMS keys, and centralized logging.

• Plan backup, recovery, and rollback procedures

  Document recovery points, rollback triggers, and acceptance tests.

• Define RTO and RPO targets per application
• Configure automated backups and test restore procedures

  Verify restore scripts and backup integrity regularly.

• Provision a staging environment mirroring production

  Match architecture, network, and representative data subsets.

• Migrate a pilot workload to staging and validate

  Choose a representative app and dataset for the pilot.

• Run functional, performance, and failover tests in staging

  Include load, latency, and resilience checks under real conditions.

• Optimize performance and costs based on test results

  Right-size compute, adjust storage tiers, and tune autoscaling.

• Create detailed cutover and rollback plan with timelines

  List DNS changes, final sync steps, and exact rollback criteria.

• Schedule migration window, notify stakeholders, and enforce change freeze

  Confirm staffing, runbooks, and communication channels.

• 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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