Cloud Migration Strategy Guide: Step-by-Step

Cloud migration is a lucrative opportunity. It can deliver a whopping 180% ROI, according to McKinsey. Yet, only an estimated 10% of companies manage to capture the full value of the cloud. Joining them (and maximizing the return on your cloud investment) starts with properly selected cloud migration strategies.

This comprehensive cloud migration guide leads you through the whole process, from understanding the benefits to carrying out the actual migration. First, we discuss the reasons for high cloud adoption rates. Then we provide a detailed step-by-step cloud migration plan. We also talk in detail about six migration strategies and illustrate them based on our experience.

Cloud migration is the process of moving your applications and/or data from an on-premise infrastructure to a cloud environment or from one cloud provider to another.

Businesses migrate to the cloud for several reasons, including:

• Cost savings due to the economies of scale and pay-as-you-go pricing
• Instant scalability thanks to auto-scaling and temporary virtual machine instances
• Cutting-edge technology enablement for AI/ML (including generative AI), big data analytics, etc.
• Robust security measures enabled by the provider
• Easier regulatory compliance as certifications are handled by the cloud provider

As for the state of cloud migration in 2025, three trends stand out:

• Multi-cloud is going strong. Companies tend to avoid putting all the workloads into one basket: 86% of organizations surveyed by Flexera use multiple clouds. Among them, the majority (70%) combine public and private clouds.
• AI drives cloud adoption. AI-related public cloud services are, perhaps, the easiest way to add AI capabilities to an organization, with AI/ML PaaS services booming. 79% of organizations are using or experimenting with such services, and 72% of Flexera respondents use GenAI.
• Edge computing is gaining traction. As the demand for privacy and real-time analytics collide, edge computing — data processing on devices rather than in the cloud — piques companies’ interest. For example, McDonald’s partnered with Google Cloud to use edge computing for its mobile app and self-service kiosks.

Let’s take a closer look at the three key reasons why businesses continue migrating to the cloud.

Cost Savings

Migrating to the cloud helps you lower your capital and operational expenditures. You don’t need to purchase costly server equipment and spend money on its maintenance, electricity, or HVAC. Plus, your system administrators and DevOps specialists don’t need to maintain or back up hardware and software, which reduces operational costs as well.

Most cloud hosting providers offer a pay-as-you-go model in cloud computing, so your monthly expenses will depend on the resources you actually use.

For example, an IDC study found that moving to a public cloud platform saved organizations an average of 51% in operating costs. Or, take TymeBank, the first digital bank in South Africa, as an example. Moving 85% of its infrastructure from data centers to the AWS Cloud reduced the bank’s infrastructure costs by 47%.

Scalability and Flexibility

The cloud allows you to automatically add resources during peak loads and lower capacity when traffic is low. In contrast, when hosting on-premises, you need to buy additional equipment to meet peak loads and spend time on its installation.

Migrating data to the cloud is a good choice if you plan to expand to new markets and quickly acquire new customers. Moving to the cloud in 2008 helped Netflix withstand incremental growth in monthly streaming hours. In 2016, Netflix expanded its service to over 130 new countries. Leveraging several AWS cloud regions made global expansion smooth and successful.

Reliability

Unfortunately, downtime and hardware failures happen. But migrating to cloud computing can greatly shorten downtimes and reduce the risk of data loss. Most cloud hosting providers offer service-level agreements (SLAs) that guarantee up to 99.9% availability.

Providers analyze and mitigate all risks of failure related to hardware, timeouts, failover faults, and migration problems. The cloud provider is responsible for backups and quick disaster recovery, which saves time for your company on recovery operations.

In 2010, Gartner published its five strategies for cloud migration. Later, AWS slightly changed this list and introduced their so-called “6 R’s”. Let’s talk in detail about each of them.

Replatforming

During replatforming, also known as “lift, tinker, and shift,” developers make several minor optimizations before migration. This doesn’t include changes to the app’s core architecture, however, as that falls under refactoring.

Our Experience

One of our clients wanted to expand an AWS software solution to another country. That country had strict laws that required storing its citizens’ data inside the country.

The problem was that AWS didn’t have data centers in the target country. To solve this issue, we decided to replatform our client’s solution with the Oracle Cloud, which had data centers in our target country. Thus, we left the front end of the solution unchanged and only slightly modified the back end.

Refactoring/Rearchitecting

Refactoring implies a complete reengineering of the solution to create a cloud-native version of it. This cloud migration strategy is the most time-consuming and costly. But it ensures long-term cost savings by matching actual resource requirements with cloud infrastructure. Also, cloud-native apps allow companies to quickly adapt to new customer requirements, as developers can easily add or modify existing functionality.

Our Experience

For another client, we used this strategy to move their back-end from on-premises to the AWS cloud to ensure that the app could withstand high loads. First, we did an architecture assessment and:

• Dockerized all backend applications
• Automated deployment to the Development and Production environments
• Set up actualized, refactored integration tests to run automatically in the pipeline
• Integrated SonarQube for code analysis and built a project code quality dashboard
• Documented the feature branch strategy and release flow for the full project

Our architects offered a solution to split the monolithic app into reusable microservices and develop new sub-projects based on them. To decrease the deployment, operating, and migration costs, we used a Kubernetes cluster managed by AWS. Integrating data science services into this approach can further optimize microservices by analyzing usage patterns and resource allocation.

Rehosting (lift-and-shift)

With the help of this cloud migration strategy, developers simply move on-premises system components to the cloud without changing anything. This strategy is easier, faster, and cheaper than the previous two cloud migration strategies. Rehosting also allows for easier compliance and security management.

However, for most projects, it’s rather a short-term solution than a long-term option. The main bottleneck of using this service is the risk that apps will face latency or performance issues after migration because they weren’t optimized or modified to fit the cloud environment.

Our Experience

In our experience, classic lift and shift cases are rare. Usually, such cases still require replatforming or refactoring. As it was with one of our clients, who wanted to expand their solution to another AWS region with a simple rehosting strategy.

After a deep root-cause analysis of the requirements, we concluded that their case also needed reengineering before rehosting. A major issue was a payment provider that wasn’t supported in the country where the product should work. To address this, we duplicated the product from one region to the new country of expansion. This caused integration issues that needed to be fixed and tested before deployment.

Repurchasing

You can use this cloud migration strategy if you have commercially licensed software and want to migrate to SaaS alternatives. For instance, you can move from a proprietary on-premises customer relationship management (CRM) system to Salesforce.

Retiring

When developing an application portfolio, you may discover software solutions that you don’t need anymore or that have the same functionality as other solutions you use. In this case, retiring them is the best option.

Retaining/Revisiting

Sometimes, for security reasons, due to the need for major refactoring efforts, or regulatory compliance, your software solution needs to remain on-premises. You can revisit apps of this category later to check if they can be moved to the cloud after a while.

Security remains the second most common cloud challenge, right after managing cloud spend. That said, major cloud providers put a wide range of cutting-edge security tools at their customers’ disposal and frequently update software to mitigate new cybersecurity threats. The ball is in your court when it comes to properly configuring the provider’s security tools, however.

What’s more, cloud providers also offer solutions for organizations that need to comply with stringent security and privacy regulations (GDPR, HIPAA, SOC 2, etc.).

To protect sensitive data, you can also use a private cloud. This is a cloud environment dedicated to only one organization and hosted on the organization’s own equipment or by a cloud provider.

Though a private cloud may cost more and require more effort from your IT staff, this option provides a higher level of security and customization while offering the same level of efficiency and scalability as a public cloud. A hybrid cloud environment, which is steadily gaining popularity among organizations, typically uses both private and public clouds.

To make your cloud migration and hosting highly secure, you should also focus on implementing and enforcing policies on cloud ownership, responsibility, and risk acceptance, as well as staff training. Consider hiring a cloud and DevOps services partner to ensure complete data security and compliance during and after your migration.

When you realize that the benefits of the cloud environment align with your business needs, it’s time to start preparing to migrate. Bear in mind that smooth migration requires qualified IT staff with experience in application migration. If your staff isn’t experienced enough to lead the cloud migration process, you can contract with a dedicated team that can do everything for you.

Here’s your high-level overview of the key cloud migration steps.

Step 1. Define the Scope of Migration

Start by auditing and assessing your application portfolio for cloud readiness. What software do you use? Which software solutions will bring value when in the cloud? What applications don’t bring value and should be turned off?

During this assessment, you can use a TIME quadrant, one of the effective methods to define what to do with each component of your current system. Here’s an example of the TIME analysis:

1. Tolerate. If you understand that migrating apps to the cloud won’t help you achieve your business objectives or you can’t move them to the digital environment for compliance reasons, put them in the Tolerate section. Retaining the app on-premises is the best practice for these apps.
2. Invest. Under this category fall innovative applications that have high business value but need some improvements and adjustments to deliver maximum value to your business. Replatforming and rearchitecting are common strategies for this type of app.
3. Migrate. To this section, you should put apps that have high business value and don’t need extensive changes. Use a rehosting strategy for them.
4. Eliminate. Applications that should be eliminated have low quality and low business value. In this case, you should use a repurchase or retire strategy.

Step 2. Choose a Cloud Migration Strategy

The category of your app will help you identify the right migration strategy among the 6 R’s we described above. It requires a careful assessment of the workloads, including application architecture, tech stack, and interdependencies between applications and workloads.

While each migration case is unique, we can generally sum up when each cloud migration strategy is more suitable than others:

Step 3. Define Migration Success

The next step in the cloud migration plan is to establish key performance indicators (KPIs). This will help you measure how well migration meets your business goals and expectations.

Here are the types of KPIs you should define during cloud migration planning to measure before and after moving data to the cloud:

• Average response time – the amount of time the server usually takes to return the results of a request within a certain period
• Peak response time – the longest server response time within a certain period
• Overall uptime – the percentage of time the server and app are accessible to end users and running correctly
• Error rates – the ratio between error requests and total requests
• Error types – the number of logged app errors and thrown exceptions grouped by type
• Network latency – the delay between a user’s request and the server’s response
• CPU and memory use
• Number of data exposures
• Indicators of compromise (IOCs) – the frequency of unusual and potentially malicious user activity
• Network I/O – the use of network bandwidth for all monitored network devices
• Monthly billing
• Ongoing staffing costs
• Hardware costs
• External costs (money saved on electricity, storage, etc.)

Step 4. Choose a Cloud Environment

When choosing a cloud environment, you should first define the cloud model you want to use. You can choose between a public cloud (with a multi-tenant architecture, meaning several customers share cloud resources), a private cloud, and a hybrid cloud model.

Next, you should choose a cloud provider for your model of migration into cloud. Every year, Gartner releases its Magic Quadrant that defines the best cloud IaaS providers in terms of worldwide enterprise adoption, capabilities, and service availability. In the Magic Quadrant for global IaaS vendors in 2024, Gartner defines three market leaders: AWS, Microsoft Azure, and Google Cloud Platform.

All these providers offer public, private, and hybrid clouds. They also have price calculators so you can quickly find out the cost of using AWS, Azure, or GCP services. You can also think about setting up a multicloud environment, which entails using multiple private and public clouds.

Amazon Web Services (AWS)

AWS is an undisputed market leader that’s available in 36 geographic regions. It offers a wide range of services (analytics, storage, networking, content delivery, and machine learning services) and has proved to be highly secure, reliable, and scalable. It has extensive technical documentation and a great set of migration software to ease migration and maintenance. This is our choice for most projects.

But there are some downsides to AWS as well. AWS limits resource use by region, so the quantity of resources you can access is determined by your location. Also, it has a complex billing system that can be confusing.

Microsoft Azure

Azure boasts high reliability and availability and offers an SLA of 99.95% (which is approximately 4.3 hours of downtime per year). It’s a scalable and secure solution.

On the other hand, it has the lowest ratio of availability zones to regions of any provider in Gartner’s Magic Quadrant. Also, it requires qualified IT staff to constantly manage and maintain the system (for things like patching and server monitoring). Azure migration can be easily done with the tools offered by Azure.

Google Cloud Platform (GCP)

GCP offers live migrations of Virtual Machines during maintenance events, meaning you can migrate live loads without app downtime. GCP is a cost-effective and secure solution that has a large list of availability zones, boasts high performance and productivity, and stores data redundantly, with automatic checksums to ensure data integrity.

But developers complain about a lack of quick and efficient customer support from Google after the migration. Also, despite its robust AI and big data services, some developers claim that GCP doesn’t innovate fast enough to keep up with AWS.

Step 5. Automate Migration

Sometimes, you need to migrate hundreds of app components and conduct thousands of performance tests to ensure a successful cloud migration. Migration tools can come to the rescue, allowing developers to automate the cloud migration process. The result? Faster migration, reduced risks and downtime, lower migration costs, and increased time-to-value.

The big three IaaS providers offer their own services for streamlining cloud migration phases:

• AWS Server Migration Service
• Azure Migrate
• Google Migrate for Compute Engine

There are also a number of paid cloud-agnostic solutions like Carbonite Migrate, Micro Focus PlateSpin, Turbonomic, and Corent SurPaaS.

Migrating to the cloud won’t free your IT staff from managing environments and deployments. But infrastructure-as-code, or IaC, tools can. IaC uses a high-level coding language to replace manual infrastructure management efforts with several lines of code. With IaC, DevOps specialists explicitly code all infrastructure specifications in configuration files, and the whole infrastructure operates under rules defined in these files.

The most commonly used IaC tools include Terraform, AWS CloudFormation, Azure Resource Manager, and Google Infrastructure Manager (Google Cloud Deployment Manager reaches end of support on December 31, 2025). Terraform is a cloud-agnostic solution, while the other tools are dedicated to a certain cloud provider.

Developers can also automate continuous integration (CI), continuous delivery (CD), and test-driven development (TDD). You can also optimize your environment by the use of deployment orchestration, automated testing libraries, and version control systems (VCSs) to enhance and strengthen the integrity and fault tolerance of your software.

Step 6. Conduct a Pilot Migration

We recommend you test the waters before you proceed to a large-scale migration. Conducting a pilot migration helps you check if your migration strategy is effective and identify what improvements you can make for a smooth transition.

To conduct a pilot migration:

• Prepare the cloud platform
• Identify the first adopters – apps or data with small workloads that will be migrated
• Migrate pilot workloads to the cloud
• Measure and analyze performance and latency
• Optimize processes, tools, and platforms according to the insights you receive
• Get ready for large-scale migration

Step 7. Migrate

At this point, you’ve made all the preparations and successfully tested your cloud strategy. Now, it’s time to take the most important step in the migration project lifecycle. In this step, you’ll run your production migration and move your users and data over to the cloud.

As you can see, migrating to the cloud is a complex process that requires thoughtful preparation and solid experience from the team responsible. If you want to move your system to a cloud-based infrastructure and are looking for developers who can do it for you, Yalantis can help. Our specialists have a strong track record of conducting successful cloud migrations. We’ll carefully analyze your business needs and help you choose the strategy that fits you best.

AWS, Microsoft Azure, and Google Cloud Platform are the top three public cloud providers for enterprises, used by 79%, 77%, and 45% of organizations in 2025, respectively. Here’s how they compare and when you should use which:

Managing cloud spend is the number one challenge for enterprises and SMBs alike, and tackling it starts even before you migrate your first workload. Here are the one-time migration costs that you should prepare for:

• Preparation and planning (cloud readiness assessment, cloud migration approach selection, etc.)
• Migration tools (certain tools entail licensing fees)
• Data transfer fees charged by the cloud provider
• Refactoring/rearchitecting (if necessary)
• Cloud migration automation setup
• Upskilling your staff to enable them to use/manage cloud services

Once the migration is complete, you’ll need to manage multiple recurring costs. They include:

• Cloud storage and computing fees (depend on the region/availability zone)
• Cloud security and compliance fees
• Request fees
• Network usage and data processing fees
• Data egress fees
• Licensing costs for new cloud management software
• Labor costs for the staff maintaining and optimizing the cloud infrastructure

When you’re planning your cloud migration journey, keep these four common cost traps in mind:

• Unrealistic ROI estimates and poorly defined success metrics
• Lack of cloud expertise that may lead to reworks and inefficient cloud use
• Overlooked long-term discounts or savings plans
• Reliance on manual processes instead of automation tools during migration

As for how much your migration into a cloud would cost your business, the price tag depends on a variety of factors, from the refactoring necessary to workload sizes and data volumes. We can prepare a cost estimate for your project. Get in touch with Yalantis’ cloud consulting experts to discuss your migration needs.

Each cloud provider offers migration tools tailored to its services. Those include AWS Migration Hub, Azure Migrate, and Google Cloud Migration Center. Your choice among them will be dictated by the cloud provider you select, of course.

That said, here’s how these tools compare, in broad strokes:

• AWS Migration Hub offers end-to-end support for migration assessment and planning, template-based and custom migration to AWS services, and application refactoring. It comes with powerful application and server discovery, diverse journey templates, dependency identification, and orchestration features.
• Azure Migrate is Microsoft’s free migration tool that supports migration assessment, inventory, dependency mapping, refactoring, and migration automation. It also enables migrating on-premises web apps and databases, offline data, and SQL Server databases to Azure.
• Google Cloud Migration Center is Google’s unified migration platform that gives you access to tools for estimating cloud spend, discovering assets, and handling different migration scenarios. Those scenarios include migration from AWS and Azure to GCP, migration to Containers and Virtual Machines, and database migration.

Unfortunately, cloud migration can go wrong in so many ways. Here are the five common migration risks and how we mitigate them at Yalantis.

Downtime

Downtime can cost large organizations as much as $9,000 a minute, so avoiding it can be high on your list of priorities. Yet, if you migrate business-critical applications to the cloud, their downtime may seem inevitable. Large database migration can also lead to downtime since data is put in read-only mode to prevent inconsistencies.

Solution: You can minimize or even eliminate downtime by deploying a duplicate environment in the cloud and gradually rerouting traffic to it. You can also use continuous data replication or build a temporary hybrid architecture. Pilot migration is a must for selecting the right downtime prevention approach.

Data Loss

Sudden network disruptions can lead to data loss and corruption during its transfer to the cloud. If you migrate large datasets that dynamically change, you may also risk losing the freshly recorded or updated data.

Solution: Back up all the data before the data migration and validate the transferred data using checksums. You’ll also need to account for this risk during planning by defining and testing recovery and rollback procedures.

Vendor Lock-In

With time, your business needs may change and you may outgrow your cloud provider. Yet, if your workloads were optimized specifically for this provider’s tooling and infrastructure, transferring them to a different provider may require another round of substantial refactoring.

Solution: To maintain long-term flexibility, opt for open standards and third-party tools for your cloud applications and databases. Opt for a cloud-agnostic architecture and thoroughly document it to facilitate a potential future migration.

Performance Degradation

In certain cases, businesses may see their workloads’ performance gradually degrade after migration. Improperly configured scaling, lack of critical cloud optimizations, or inappropriately selected VMs are the usual culprits behind this issue.

Solution: Conduct thorough post-migration optimization and monitor performance using the selected metrics. Set up CDNs, choose the right regions and availability zones, and VM types and storage classes. Optimize data storage, access, data flows, and database processes, too.

Security Misconfigurations

While cloud migration can help you improve your security posture with advanced tools made available by the cloud provider, it also opens your software estate to new security risks. These risks typically stem from improperly configured access controls, disabled activity logging or alerts, exposed databases and storage buckets, and lack of strong encryption.

Solution: Ensure you have a cloud security expert onboard to configure all security tools and measures, including encryption in transit and at rest, identity access management, and logging and alerts. Automate security checks within the CI/CD pipelines and add a cloud security posture management tool to your software stack.

It might be tempting to consider the whole affair done once your workloads are up and running in the cloud. Yet, migration is only the first step to unlocking the full value of the cloud. Next, you need to leverage cloud-native capabilities to their fullest to maximize the ROI of your transition.

Here’s our post-cloud migration checklist:

• Adapt the computing model to specific data use cases. We identify data use patterns and optimize resource use in data pipelines, analytics clusters (Spark, database engines), and ETL/ELT processes.
• Set up cost-aware scaling. It enables effective resource use and cost management while maintaining high performance during peak request periods.
• Optimize data storage and access. We use hot-cold layering, suitable archiving formats (Parquet, ORC), partitioning, and indexation to optimize cloud storage costs and speed up data retrieval and processing.
• Rebuild data flows. We eliminate unnecessary data movements and duplicates and maximize performance with async and parallel processing.
• Set up pipeline monitoring. Real-time and batch monitoring with automated alerts on delays, errors, and bottlenecks allows for resolving issues before they negatively affect business processes.
• Evaluate database resource utilization. Based on our findings, we optimize SQL requests, data transformations, and visualizations. We also automate command recommendations, speed up dashboards, and set up caching for results.
• Establish data governance. We integrate data governance and access systems, such as data classification and access logs, to establish data trustworthiness and enable compliance with the GDPR and ISO.
• Conduct regular load testing and capacity planning. This enables us to effectively prepare the infrastructure for volume increases, new capabilities, and additional use cases (e.g., ML analytics, stream processing).
• Conduct a final health check and prepare a roadmap. We provide a detailed health check report and outline future areas of improvement to help our clients turn data into a growth catalyst.

Careful planning and thorough testing are key to successful cloud migration. So, before you start moving your workloads to the cloud environment, make sure you have the right expertise to:

• Define the full scope of your migration
• Select the most suitable migration strategy
• Identify and handle dependencies
• Select the right cloud provider and type
• Optimize migration with automation tools
• Test and refine the migration strategy

Having the right cloud expertise at the very start will also help you avoid cost overruns in the long run, maintain compliance, and enhance cloud security.

Don’t know where to start with your cloud migration? Our cloud experts can help you assess your cloud readiness, define the scope of work ahead, select the right strategy, and plan it out. Get in touch with Yalantis’ cloud consulting experts to discuss your cloud transformation journey.