10 Essential Cloud Migration Best Practices for 2026

Migrating to the cloud is a critical step for modern businesses aiming to scale, improve efficiency, and drive growth. A well-executed migration can be a powerful business accelerator, but a poorly managed one often results in budget overruns, security gaps, and significant operational disruption. The success of this complex project hinges on a methodical and strategic approach, not a rushed lift-and-shift. The key is to follow established cloud migration best practices that provide a clear structure for this journey.

This guide serves as a detailed roadmap, outlining 10 essential practices that CTOs, tech leaders, and engineering teams need to master. We cut through the noise to provide actionable insights, practical checklists, and concrete examples relevant to startups and SMBs, particularly those in competitive U.S. markets from Silicon Valley to emerging tech hubs. You will learn how to properly assess your environment, choose the right migration strategy, and build a secure, cost-effective, and high-performing cloud foundation.

Whether you are building your internal DevOps capabilities or evaluating top DevOps consultancies, these principles will help you navigate every stage. From the initial cloud readiness assessment and security planning to post-migration optimization, adhering to these best practices ensures your cloud transformation delivers on its promise of agility and value, setting you up for long-term success. Let's dive into the core strategies for a seamless and effective cloud migration.

1. Conduct a Comprehensive Cloud Readiness Assessment

A successful cloud journey doesn't begin with moving a single server; it starts with a deep, honest evaluation of your current state. A Cloud Readiness Assessment is a foundational step in any cloud migration, providing a detailed snapshot of your technical infrastructure, application dependencies, operational processes, and organizational skill sets. Skipping this crucial analysis is a leading cause of budget overruns, unexpected downtime, and failed migration projects. It's an indispensable part of modern cloud migration best practices.

This process goes beyond a simple inventory. It systematically identifies which applications can be easily moved ("lift-and-shift"), which need moderate changes ("re-platform"), and which require a complete overhaul ("re-architect" or "re-factor"). The assessment also uncovers hidden technical debt, complex interdependencies, and potential security vulnerabilities that could derail a migration. For startups and SMBs, this foresight prevents wasting limited capital on a flawed strategy.

How to Implement a Readiness Assessment

To execute a meaningful assessment, combine automated discovery with cross-functional human analysis.

• Automated Discovery: Start by using tools like the AWS Migration Readiness Assessment (MRA), Azure Migrate, or Google Cloud's migration tools. These platforms scan your environment to map servers, discover application dependencies, and estimate initial costs. For example, a startup could use a tool like CloudHealth or Turbonomic to get a clear picture of its current on-premises or co-located infrastructure before even choosing a cloud provider.

• Cross-Functional Workshops: Bring together leaders from DevOps, security, finance, and key business units. The tools provide the "what," but your teams provide the "why." This collaboration is essential for ranking applications based on business impact versus migration difficulty.

• Documentation and Scoring: Catalog all findings in a shared knowledge base (like Confluence or a detailed Wiki). Develop a scoring system that rates applications on factors like complexity, business criticality, and data sensitivity. This creates a data-driven priority list for the migration itself.

A common pitfall is treating the readiness assessment as a one-time IT task. Instead, it should be a living business exercise that aligns technical possibilities with strategic goals, ensuring the most critical, high-impact workloads are prioritized correctly. This alignment is a cornerstone of effective cloud migration best practices.

2. Implement the 6 Rs Migration Strategy Framework

Once you know what you have, the next step is deciding what to do with it. The "6 Rs" framework provides a structured vocabulary for categorizing how each application or workload will move to the cloud. This model, popularized by AWS and Gartner, is a cornerstone of modern cloud migration best practices because it prevents teams from defaulting to a one-size-fits-all approach, instead promoting deliberate, application-specific decisions.

The framework guides you through six distinct pathways: Rehost, Replatform, Refactor, Repurchase, Retire, and Retain. By assigning each application to one of these categories, you can build a realistic roadmap that balances quick wins with long-term strategic goals. For instance, a startup might choose to Repurchase by switching from a self-hosted tool like GitLab to a SaaS version, immediately reducing management overhead. Meanwhile, an enterprise like Capital One might Replatform legacy banking systems to run on cloud infrastructure with minimal code changes to accelerate their migration timeline.

How to Apply the 6 Rs Framework

Effectively using the 6 Rs requires documentation, clear ownership, and a willingness to make tough decisions.

• Categorize and Document: Use a spreadsheet or a migration planning tool to create an inventory of your applications. Add a column to assign one of the 6 Rs to each application. This document becomes your central migration playbook. For example, a healthcare organization might list a legacy patient portal and assign it the "Retire" strategy, earmarking it for decommissioning after its functions are absorbed by a new system.

• Prioritize for Impact: Start with low-complexity, high-impact moves. Rehosting (lift-and-shift) applications to Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS) can deliver immediate cost savings and operational wins. For SMBs, focusing on Rehost and Retire first is a great way to reduce infrastructure footprint and simplify the overall project scope.

• Calculate Total Cost of Ownership (TCO): For any Repurchase decision, go beyond the sticker price. Calculate the full TCO, which includes not only subscription fees but also data migration costs, user training, and any potential integration work. This ensures you're making a financially sound decision.

A critical mistake is treating the 6 Rs as a static, one-time classification. Instead, view it as a dynamic tool. An application initially marked for "Retain" might become a candidate for "Refactor" as new cloud services become available or business priorities shift. Appoint a 'cloud champion' for each major application to ensure these decisions are continuously reviewed.

3. Adopt Infrastructure-as-Code (IaC) for Cloud Environments

Manually configuring cloud resources through a web console is slow, error-prone, and impossible to scale. Infrastructure-as-Code (IaC) moves infrastructure management away from manual clicks and into version-controlled, executable code. This approach treats your servers, networks, and databases as software, enabling you to define, deploy, and update them automatically. Adopting IaC is a cornerstone of modern DevOps and a critical factor for repeatable cloud migration best practices.

Using IaC ensures every environment-from development to production-is identical, which eliminates "it works on my machine" issues. It provides a single source of truth for your infrastructure, making it auditable, reproducible, and easy to recover in a disaster. For instance, a fintech startup can use Terraform to instantly provision isolated and compliant development environments for each engineer, then destroy them just as quickly to control costs.

How to Implement IaC in Your Migration

Integrating IaC requires choosing the right tools and establishing clear processes around code management.

• Select the Right Tool: Your choice depends on your cloud strategy. Use HashiCorp Terraform for multi-cloud or hybrid-cloud deployments, as it works with AWS, Azure, and Google Cloud. For an AWS-only stack, AWS CloudFormation provides deep integration. Ansible is a great choice for configuration management and application deployment on top of provisioned infrastructure.

• Use Version Control: All IaC scripts must be stored in a Git repository (like GitHub or GitLab). This provides a full history of changes, enables peer reviews through pull requests, and allows for easy rollbacks if a change introduces problems.

• Structure Your Code for Reusability: Don't write monolithic scripts. Separate your configurations into reusable modules and keep environment-specific settings (like IP addresses or instance sizes) in separate variable files. This makes your code more maintainable and adaptable. You can learn more about how this fits into a broader strategy by exploring the role of automation in DevOps.

A frequent mistake is attempting to retroactively apply IaC to a complex, manually-created environment. Instead, begin by defining new, "greenfield" environments with IaC first. This builds team competency and demonstrates value before you tackle the more difficult task of codifying existing infrastructure.

4. Establish a Phased Migration Timeline with Prioritization Strategy

Attempting to migrate an entire IT estate in one massive "big bang" event is a recipe for disaster. A phased migration approach systematically staggers the process over time, reducing risk and allowing teams to build momentum. This strategy involves breaking the migration into manageable waves or sprints, prioritized based on business impact, technical complexity, and application dependencies. Adopting this practice is essential for maintaining business continuity and is a core component of modern cloud migration best practices.

This method provides breathing room for your teams to learn, iterate, and refine their processes. An e-commerce platform might first migrate its customer-facing web applications to improve performance, followed by backend order processing systems in a later phase. A SaaS startup could migrate its on-premises infrastructure to AWS in four distinct waves over eight months, ensuring no single phase disrupts its service level agreements. This deliberate pacing distributes the workload on infrastructure and DevOps resources, preventing burnout and costly mistakes.

How to Implement a Phased Migration Timeline

A successful phased migration requires a detailed roadmap with clear success criteria for each stage.

• Create a Migration Roadmap: Develop a visual timeline that groups applications into logical waves. Define clear "phase gates" with specific criteria that must be met before moving to the next wave, such as performance benchmarks, security compliance, and budget adherence.
• Run a Pilot Phase: Start small. Select two or three representative, non-critical applications for an initial pilot. Use this phase to test your migration tools, validate your runbooks, and uncover unexpected challenges in a low-risk environment. A California healthcare startup successfully used a six-month pilot to smooth out compliance wrinkles before its full rollout.
• Prioritize Based on Value and Complexity: Use the data from your readiness assessment to sequence the migration waves. A common approach is to tackle low-complexity, low-risk applications first to score early wins and build institutional knowledge. High-value, complex systems can be scheduled for later phases when the team is more experienced.
• Conduct Post-Phase Retrospectives: After completing each wave, hold a retrospective meeting with all stakeholders. Analyze what went well and what didn't. Use these findings to update documentation, refine procedures, and improve the execution of subsequent phases.

A critical mistake is under-resourcing migration waves by sharing DevOps engineers across too many concurrent tasks. Dedicate a focused team to each phase to ensure accountability and deep focus, which accelerates the process and reduces errors. This disciplined resource allocation is a hallmark of effective cloud migration best practices.

5. Implement Comprehensive Logging, Monitoring, and Observability

Moving to the cloud without a plan for visibility is like flying a plane with no instruments; you lose the ability to diagnose problems, understand performance, and ensure stability. Implementing a robust observability strategy before, during, and after migration is a non-negotiable part of modern cloud migration best practices. This involves centralizing logs, collecting performance metrics, and tracing requests as they travel through your distributed systems, giving you deep insight into application and infrastructure behavior.

Observability goes beyond simple monitoring. It provides the context needed to answer unknown questions about system performance, which is essential in dynamic cloud-native environments. For instance, a startup can use an Application Performance Monitoring (APM) tool like Datadog or New Relic to pinpoint the exact microservice causing a slowdown, rather than guessing. Financial institutions often rely on platforms like Splunk for deep log analysis that satisfies strict compliance and security reporting requirements.

How to Implement Observability

Building a strong observability foundation requires a mix of the right tools and a disciplined operational culture.

• Establish Centralized Logging: Consolidate logs from all applications, servers, and cloud services into a single, searchable platform. Popular open-source choices include the ELK Stack (Elasticsearch, Logstash, Kibana), while cloud providers offer integrated solutions like AWS CloudWatch Logs, Azure Monitor Logs, and Google Cloud Logging. Using structured logging formats like JSON makes searching and filtering far more effective.

• Define Core Metrics and Dashboards: Track the "golden signals" for every service: latency, traffic, errors, and saturation. Use tools like Prometheus for metrics collection and Grafana for creating real-time visualization dashboards. These dashboards should be the first place your team looks to understand system health.

• Implement Distributed Tracing: In a microservices architecture, a single user request can touch dozens of services. Distributed tracing tools connect these interactions, providing a complete view of a request's lifecycle. This is invaluable for debugging performance bottlenecks in complex systems.

A critical mistake is treating observability as a post-migration cleanup task. It must be designed and implemented from day one of the planning phase. Establishing baselines before you migrate is the only way to accurately measure the impact of the move and quickly troubleshoot any performance degradation.

6. Design and Implement a Robust Data Migration and Synchronization Strategy

Application code is often the easiest part of a cloud migration; it’s the data that presents the greatest risk and complexity. A robust data migration strategy is a detailed plan for moving information from on-premises systems to the cloud while ensuring consistency, integrity, and minimal business disruption. This process is frequently the most time-consuming phase, and without proper planning, it can lead to data loss, corruption, or extended downtime. A well-executed data strategy is a critical component of modern cloud migration best practices.

This strategy involves far more than a simple database dump and restore. It requires a deep audit of your data sources, selection of appropriate tools, and a plan for keeping data synchronized during the transition. For example, an e-commerce company cannot afford hours of downtime to move its product and customer databases. Instead, it must use continuous replication to keep the new cloud database updated in real-time until the final cutover, ensuring a seamless customer experience.

How to Implement a Data Migration Strategy

A successful data migration combines meticulous planning, the right tools, and rigorous validation.

• Audit and Classify Data: Before moving anything, conduct a data audit to identify what you have. You will likely find redundant, obsolete, or trivial (ROT) data that can be archived or retired instead of migrated. This reduces complexity and saves on cloud storage costs.

• Select Appropriate Tooling: Choose tools based on your specific needs. For moving petabytes of analytics data, Google Cloud's Transfer Service is ideal. For a zero-downtime, heterogeneous database migration (e.g., Oracle to Amazon Aurora), AWS Database Migration Service (DMS) with its Change Data Capture (CDC) feature is a powerful choice. Large enterprises often use platforms like Azure Data Factory, Talend, or Informatica to manage complex ETL (Extract, Transform, Load) pipelines.

• Validate and Re-Validate: Data integrity is non-negotiable. Implement validation scripts that run before and after the migration. These scripts should compare row counts, run checksums on data segments, and execute business-logic queries to confirm that data is accurate in the new environment. The migration is not complete until this validation passes.

A frequent mistake is underestimating the need for a parallel run. For business-critical systems, plan to run your on-premises and cloud databases in parallel for an extended period, sometimes weeks. This allows you to thoroughly validate the new cloud system with live production traffic before decommissioning the old one, providing a crucial safety net.

7. Establish Clear Security, Compliance, and Governance Policies for Cloud

Treating security and compliance as an afterthought is one of the most dangerous mistakes in a cloud migration. Security must be foundational, integrated into the migration strategy from day one, not bolted on after a security incident. Establishing clear policies for security, compliance, and governance before moving workloads ensures that your cloud environment is built on a secure and auditable footing. This is a non-negotiable part of modern cloud migration best practices.

This process involves defining how your organization will manage identities, protect data, secure networks, and meet regulatory requirements in the cloud. For a healthcare provider, this means building a HIPAA-compliant environment from the start. For a financial institution, it means designing a PCI-DSS-compliant architecture with strict network segmentation. These rules become the blueprint for your cloud landing zone, ensuring every resource deployed adheres to company and industry standards.

How to Implement Cloud Security and Governance

A successful security strategy combines proactive planning with automated enforcement and continuous monitoring.

• Engage Teams Early and Define Frameworks: Bring security, legal, and compliance teams into migration planning from the very beginning. Use established frameworks like the NIST Cybersecurity Framework or CIS Benchmarks as a baseline. Cloud providers offer tools like AWS Config, Azure Policy, and Google Cloud Security Command Center to help you translate these policies into automated guardrails.

• Implement Identity and Access Management (IAM): Start with a Zero Trust mindset and enforce the principle of least privilege for every user and service account. Mandate multi-factor authentication (MFA) across the board. Use cloud-native tools like AWS Secrets Manager or Azure Key Vault to manage credentials, removing them from your code. Integrating a central identity provider like Okta or Azure AD is also a key practice.

• Automate and Audit: Use Cloud Security Posture Management (CSPM) tools to automatically scan your environment for misconfigurations and policy drift. Regularly audit IAM permissions to identify and remove unused roles, shrinking your potential attack surface. This focus on security in DevOps creates a more resilient system.

A critical pitfall is assuming the cloud provider's compliance (e.g., "AWS is HIPAA compliant") automatically makes your application compliant. The cloud provider is responsible for the security of the cloud, but you are responsible for security in the cloud. Your architecture, data handling, and access controls must also meet the required standards.

8. Build and Scale DevOps Capabilities and Team Skills in Parallel

Cloud migration is not just a technological shift; it's an operational and cultural one. Moving to the cloud without developing the in-house skills to manage it is a recipe for high costs, instability, and missed opportunities. Building your team's DevOps capabilities in parallel with the migration ensures you can operate, automate, and optimize your new cloud-native environment effectively. This is a non-negotiable step in any modern cloud migration best practices framework.

This process involves more than just hiring a "DevOps person." It requires a deliberate strategy to embed a culture of automation, continuous improvement, and shared responsibility across development and operations teams. As you migrate workloads, your teams should simultaneously be building CI/CD pipelines, adopting infrastructure as code (IaC), and learning to use containerization tools like Docker and Kubernetes. This parallel effort transforms your team from reactive server administrators to proactive cloud engineers.

How to Implement Parallel Skill Development

A combined approach of strategic hiring, targeted training, and cultural change is necessary for success.

• Strategic Hiring and Training: Begin by hiring one or two experienced cloud DevOps engineers who can establish best practices and mentor existing staff. Simultaneously, invest in formal training programs like AWS Training and Certification or courses on platforms like A Cloud Guru to upskill your current teams. A Fortune 500 company might establish a formal Cloud Center of Excellence (CCoE) to standardize this process, while a smaller business could focus on targeted certifications like the Kubernetes CKAD. You can find more details on strategic hiring for your team and building a high-performing DevOps team for US businesses here.

• Establish DevOps Practices: Immediately start implementing core DevOps tenants. Create CI/CD pipelines for the first applications being migrated. Mandate the use of IaC tools like Terraform or CloudFormation for all new infrastructure provisioning. Establish on-call procedures and a "blameless postmortem" culture where failures are treated as learning opportunities, not reasons for punishment.

• Foster a Learning Culture: Encourage knowledge sharing through internal documentation, runbooks, and peer-learning sessions. Track key DevOps metrics like deployment frequency, Mean Time to Resolution (MTTR), and change failure rate to measure progress and demonstrate the value of this investment.

The most common failure point is treating team upskilling as an afterthought to the technical migration. Investing in your people from day one is just as critical as choosing the right cloud provider. This human-centric approach is a hallmark of successful cloud migration best practices, ensuring long-term operational excellence.

9. Optimize Cloud Costs Through Right-Sizing, Reserved Instances, and Continuous Monitoring

Cloud migration can slash hardware costs, but it can also introduce new, unpredictable operational expenses. Failing to actively manage cloud spending is a major financial risk, often leading to bill shock where monthly costs spiral far beyond initial estimates. A disciplined, continuous approach to cost optimization is one of the most critical cloud migration best practices for ensuring long-term financial health and maximizing the return on your cloud investment.

This process involves more than just choosing the cheapest virtual machine. It's a strategic practice, often called FinOps, that brings financial accountability to the variable spending model of the cloud. By right-sizing resources to match actual performance needs, committing to long-term usage plans for predictable workloads, and constantly hunting down waste, organizations can achieve significant savings. For example, many startups have successfully cut their AWS bills from $50,000 per month down to $15,000 simply by implementing right-sizing and purchasing Reserved Instances (RIs).

How to Implement Cloud Cost Optimization

A successful cost optimization strategy combines proactive planning, automated tooling, and regular governance.

• Implement a Cost Tagging Strategy: From day one, apply tags to all cloud resources to categorize costs by project, team, environment, or cost center. This visibility is essential for tracking spend and implementing chargeback models. Retrofitting tags later is exponentially more difficult.

• Use Native and Third-Party Tools: Start with built-in tools like AWS Cost Explorer, Azure Cost Management, or Google Cloud's cost tools to analyze spending patterns. For more advanced, multi-cloud analysis and automated optimization, consider platforms like CloudHealth (by VMware), Flexera, or Densify.

• Right-Size and Automate: Don't provision resources based on on-premises peak capacity. Instead, analyze actual cloud usage metrics (CPU, memory) over several weeks and downsize over-provisioned instances. Implement auto-scaling to automatically adjust capacity based on real-time demand, ensuring you only pay for what you use.

• Commit to Savings Plans and RIs: After establishing a baseline for your steady-state workloads (typically after 3-6 months), purchase Reserved Instances or more flexible Savings Plans. These offer significant discounts (up to 70%+) in exchange for a 1- or 3-year commitment and are ideal for predictable applications like databases or core services.

The biggest mistake is treating cost optimization as a one-time cleanup task. It must be a continuous, culturally ingrained process. Establish monthly cost review meetings with engineering and finance leaders to analyze trends, question spikes, and hold teams accountable for their resource consumption. This creates a culture of cost-consciousness.

10. Plan and Execute Network Architecture and Connectivity Strategy

A high-performing application can be crippled by a poorly designed network. Your cloud network architecture is the central nervous system of your migrated environment, dictating how services communicate, how data flows securely, and how users access your applications. Underestimating this step is a common but severe error in cloud migrations, creating persistent performance bottlenecks and security vulnerabilities that are difficult and expensive to fix later. Proper network planning is an essential component of any list of cloud migration best practices.

This involves designing your cloud network topology, including Virtual Private Clouds (VPCs), subnets, and routing. It also requires a clear strategy for connecting your on-premises data centers to the cloud, whether through a secure VPN or a dedicated, high-bandwidth connection like AWS Direct Connect or Azure ExpressRoute. For example, an e-commerce startup would use a Content Delivery Network (CDN) like Amazon CloudFront to serve static assets globally, reducing latency and origin server load.

How to Implement a Network and Connectivity Strategy

A proactive and codified approach to network design prevents operational chaos after migration.

• Design Before Deployment: Use cloud provider tools like the AWS VPC Wizard or Azure Network Advisor to model your architecture. Plan for sufficient IP address space in your VPC CIDR blocks to accommodate future growth; overly restrictive subnets are a common regret. An enterprise financial institution would model and set up AWS Direct Connect for low-latency, secure connectivity to its on-premises systems before moving any production workloads.

• Codify Your Network with IaC: Define and manage your entire network configuration using Infrastructure-as-Code (IaC) tools like Terraform or AWS CloudFormation. This allows you to version control your network, automate deployments, and replicate environments consistently, reducing manual errors.

• Implement Segmentation and Security: Create separate subnets for different application tiers (web, application, database) and control traffic between them using Network Access Control Lists (NACLs) and Security Groups. For instance, a healthcare organization would use strict VPC segmentation to isolate systems containing patient data, a key requirement for HIPAA compliance.

A critical mistake is treating connectivity as an afterthought. For many businesses, especially those with hybrid needs, the network is the migration. SMBs can start with a cost-effective site-to-site VPN for initial connectivity and upgrade to a Direct Connect or ExpressRoute connection as traffic demands and budget allow. This phased approach is a smart cloud migration best practice.

10-Point Cloud Migration Best Practices Comparison

Making Your Cloud Migration a Continuous Success

Embarking on a cloud migration project can feel like preparing for a cross-country journey. You wouldn't just jump in the car and start driving; you'd map your route, check your vehicle, and plan your stops. Similarly, a successful cloud journey is built on a foundation of deliberate planning, strategic execution, and forward-thinking operations. The cloud migration best practices detailed throughout this guide are your roadmap, helping you avoid common roadblocks and ensuring you arrive at your destination efficiently and securely.

The transition to the cloud is much more than a technical "lift and shift" of servers and data. It represents a fundamental shift in how your organization operates, innovates, and delivers value. It is the starting line for a new operational model, not the finish line of a project. This distinction is critical. Organizations that view migration as a one-time event often find themselves struggling with spiraling costs, security gaps, and performance bottlenecks post-migration. In contrast, those who treat it as the beginning of a continuous improvement cycle are the ones who truly unlock the cloud's potential for agility, scalability, and cost efficiency.

From Project to Process: Key Takeaways

Recalling the core principles we've covered, several themes emerge as non-negotiable for success.

• Foundation First: A meticulous Cloud Readiness Assessment is not optional. Skipping this step is like building a house on an unstable foundation. It's here that you identify dependencies, calculate true costs, and define what success actually looks like for your business.
• Strategy Over Speed: The 6 Rs Migration Strategy Framework provides the essential vocabulary for your migration. Deciding whether to Rehost, Refactor, or Rearchitect an application dictates everything that follows, from timelines to team skill requirements.
• Automate Everything: Adopting Infrastructure-as-Code (IaC) is one of the most impactful cloud migration best practices you can implement. It moves you away from manual, error-prone configurations toward repeatable, version-controlled environments, forming the bedrock of modern DevOps and operational stability.
• Security is Not an Afterthought: Integrating Security, Compliance, and Governance from day one is paramount. The cloud operates on a shared responsibility model, and failing to define and enforce your security policies can lead to catastrophic breaches and compliance failures.

Your Actionable Next Steps

With these principles in mind, your path forward becomes clearer. Don't let the scale of the project lead to analysis paralysis. Start taking concrete, manageable steps today.

1. Assemble Your Core Team: Identify a small, cross-functional team to champion the migration effort. This group should include representatives from infrastructure, development, security, and business leadership.
2. Begin Your Assessment: Start with a single, non-critical application. Use it as a pilot to test your assessment process, document its architecture, identify dependencies, and estimate a rough migration cost. This small win will build momentum and provide valuable lessons.
3. Explore Tooling: Begin researching and experimenting with IaC tools like Terraform or CloudFormation. Create a simple "Hello, World" environment to understand the workflow and build foundational skills within your team.
4. Draft Initial Policies: Start a collaborative document outlining your initial cloud governance and security policies. Focus on identity and access management (IAM) and data encryption standards as a starting point.

By approaching your migration as a series of well-defined phases, each informed by proven cloud migration best practices, you transform a monumental task into a strategic, achievable initiative. Your goal is not just to get to the cloud; it's to build a resilient, efficient, and secure home there for years to come. This journey demands the right strategy, the right tools, and most importantly, the right people.

Finding the right talent and partners is crucial for navigating the complexities of a cloud migration. DevOps Connect Hub is a specialized platform designed to connect you with top-tier DevOps engineers, SREs, and consulting firms across the United States. Whether you need to augment your team with specific skills or find a strategic partner for your entire migration, visit DevOps Connect Hub to find the expertise required to make your cloud journey a resounding success.