What Do You Want from the Cloud?
Summit has completed countless cloud migrations. And while technical challenges exist, the biggest blocker we see isn’t infrastructure — it’s poor planning.
The real key to cloud success? Knowing what your business needs from the cloud in the first place. Before you get dazzled by the tech, get clear on your goals.
How Do You Build a Cloud Migration Plan Everyone Can Follow?
A good cloud migration plan is simple. To keep things running smoothly:
- Establish a clear leader. Appoint a project owner with the authority to execute and communicate across teams.
- Build a runbook. Document the full process and share it widely, so everyone is on the same page.
- Schedule check-ins. Meetings, calls, emails — doesn’t matter how, as long as communication is consistent.
Why Does Every Department Need a Seat at the Table?
Here’s a scenario that shows why early collaboration matters:
- IT moves email to the cloud.
- Compliance realizes the new environment hasn’t been reviewed against the organization’s data-handling requirements.
- The team has to revisit its configuration, controls, or choice of platform after the move.
Looping in the right stakeholders early could have prevented the mess. Poor planning can lead to budget overruns, disruption, and avoidable rework.
For an example of how business requirements shape infrastructure decisions, see how a manufacturer approached its switch to private cloud.
What Should You Identify Before Migrating to the Cloud?
What Are You Actually Moving?
Start by identifying the apps and workloads you’re moving — not just the obvious ones. You’ll be surprised how many are missed.
Questions to ask:
- What are you moving?
- What are the recovery point objectives (RPOs) and recovery time objectives (RTOs)?
- What are the security and compliance needs?
- Who owns each app?
- Where do they live?
- How are they connected?
- How critical is each application to the organization?
- What would happen if an application were unavailable for an hour, a day, or a week?
- What are the data protection and retention requirements?
Document these answers for each application. Recovery targets, security controls, and retention periods may differ between workloads.
Who Owns and Uses the Apps?
Find the managers behind every application slated to move. Identify who uses them and who can flag risks. Don’t let migration break something critical because no one asked the right person.
Include the departments and individuals who rely on each application, along with the people responsible for managing it. Confirm who will test the application and approve it for use after migration.
Where Do Your Applications Live, and How Much Capacity Do They Use?
Now’s the time to shed aging hardware. Figure out:
- Where apps live
- Which servers run them
- How much capacity they actually use
- What can be rightsized
Measure CPU, memory, storage, and network usage across normal operations and peak periods. This helps you size the new environment around workload requirements rather than simply copying the capacity you already have.
Many businesses unknowingly replicate waste in the cloud, leading to unnecessary costs. Don’t let that be you.
How Are Your Applications Connected?
Before migration, trace the relationships between systems. Know what apps are:
- Built for high availability
- Dependent on other infrastructure
- Susceptible to downtime
It’s far easier to mitigate issues when you know what breaks what.
Use these relationships to determine migration order. Applications that depend on the same databases, authentication services, or integrations may need to move together or maintain connectivity during the transition.
Does Moving to the Cloud Automatically Improve Availability and Reduce Costs?
All too often, organizations believe the cloud automatically makes applications highly available and redundant, and that a cloud-based infrastructure will be cheaper. This isn’t the case unless your team has a specific plan for making those goals happen.
Use your assessment to identify where resources can be rightsized and where redundancy is needed. Include licensing, migration work, backup, connectivity, and ongoing management when comparing costs.
Plan how you will protect and recover each workload. Define backup and retention requirements, and determine whether disaster recovery as a service is needed to meet your recovery objectives. High availability, backup, and disaster recovery serve different purposes; confirm which protections each application requires.
How Do You Validate Your Cloud Migration Plan?
Risk mitigation is key. That’s why we run test migrations first.
We recommend:
- Selecting a representative application or a small group of connected workloads for a test migration
- Declaring a maintenance window if testing could affect production
- Confirming that backups are recoverable before making changes
- Testing application functionality, connectivity, access, and performance in the target environment
- Measuring recovery time and checking results against your RTOs and RPOs
- Documenting rollback steps and the conditions that would trigger them
- Having application owners confirm that the migrated workloads work as expected
Use real-world data from your test to fine-tune the plan and minimize surprises.
One important consideration: old hardware doesn’t always reboot cleanly after a shutdown. If your migration requires powering down existing equipment, assess that risk and plan recovery options before the maintenance window.
Bonus tip: consider starting by migrating your backup environment to the cloud. It gives your team real data to work with — and can uncover hidden issues. Confirm that backups and restores work before relying on the new environment.
How Do You Choose a Cloud Migration Partner?
If your company doesn’t have the in-house resources or experience to manage a major cloud migration, that’s okay. That’s why we exist.
Summit can help your team assess workloads, map dependencies, and build a migration plan around your business requirements. Establish responsibilities, testing criteria, and post-migration support expectations before the move begins.
Let’s build your cloud migration plan — and execute it — the right way.