Cloud migration: the questions to ask before you move anything

"Cheaper" is rarely the honest pitch

Cloud migration is usually pitched on cost. It is often not cheaper, at least not immediately — a lift-and-shift of an existing setup tends to cost about the same or more once you account for data transfer, redundant environments during the transition, and the learning curve of running infrastructure a different way. The honest case for moving is usually flexibility and resilience, not a smaller bill.

Going in expecting savings that do not show up in month one is how migrations get quietly abandoned halfway through. Going in clear about what you are actually buying makes it much easier to judge whether the project is on track.

The questions that matter more than the provider

Which workloads actually benefit from elasticity, versus which ones run at a constant, predictable load where cloud pricing works against you? What happens to data residency and compliance obligations once systems sit with a third party? Who, specifically, owns cost monitoring after go-live, given that cloud bills are notorious for growing quietly when nobody is watching them?

None of these depend on which provider you pick. They depend on understanding your own workloads well enough to know what you are moving and why — which is usually the step skipped in favour of comparing provider price sheets.

Migrate the workload, not the assumption

The businesses that get value from cloud migration are the ones who redesign around it rather than replicate their existing setup on someone else’s hardware. That takes more upfront thought than a straight lift-and-shift, but it is where the actual benefit — resilience, scalability, reduced operational burden — comes from.