Cloud Migration Checklist: What to Do Before You Move to AWS or Azure

Cloud migration is often sold as a simple lift-and-shift, but businesses that treat it that way usually end up with higher costs and the same performance problems they started with — just running on someone else's servers. A migration is only worth doing if it's planned properly.

1. Audit what you actually have

Before moving anything, map your current infrastructure: which applications depend on which servers, what your actual traffic and storage patterns look like, and which systems are safe to modernize versus which need to move as-is first.

2. Right-size before you migrate, not after

The biggest driver of cloud cost overruns is over-provisioning — replicating your on-premise server specs in the cloud instead of matching capacity to actual usage. This is where most of the savings in a migration come from, and it has to be planned before go-live.

3. Plan for zero-downtime cutover

For customer-facing systems, migrations should run in parallel with the existing environment until traffic can be shifted with a simple DNS or load-balancer change — not a hard cutover on a single weekend.

4. Decide your security model up front

Cloud environments are secure by design, but misconfigured by default. Identity and access management, network segmentation, and encryption settings need to be defined before workloads move, not patched in afterward.

5. Set a cost monitoring baseline

Cloud billing is usage-based, which means costs can drift silently. Setting budget alerts and auto-scaling rules from day one avoids the surprise invoice that makes teams distrust the cloud migration entirely.

How we approach it

GloryTech's cloud team handles the architecture design, right-sizing, and phased cutover so migrations happen without disrupting the business — across AWS, Azure, and Google Cloud.