Cloud migration strategy: Aligning IT with business goals

You never really put a business “in the cloud.” For the most part, you simply put your workflows, solutions, and data in the cloud to ensure the now-expected business benefits of accessibility, flexibility, security, and scalability. Your business runs on. The cloud is a means, nothing more.

That said, it’s crucial that HOW you move workflows, solutions, and data to the cloud is not done independently of your business. A cloud migration may, in many cases, be a “one and done” project, which means ensuring execution within the project is strategically aligned with your overarching business goals.

This guide gets into the specifics of cloud migration as a process. You’ll note we’re not recommending a specific cloud technology because these best practices fit any cloud migration: Oracle, Azure, AWS, SAP, Salesforce — the clouds may differ in name but the means of getting there are generally the same.

What is cloud migration and why does it matter?

While most every consumer application is cloud-based and mobile, many business applications — especially larger solutions like ERP and CRM — are still on-premises. If you’re reading this and still using an on-premises ERP or CRM, you are not alone. But chances are very, very good that you soon will be. So let’s talk cloud, specifically cloud migration strategy: the what, the how, the when, the who, and the why.

Being in the cloud offers substantial benefits, especially for enterprise-level platforms like Oracle, SAP, and Dynamics — all of which began as on-premises solutions but have mostly moved to the cloud. (Salesforce — the leading CRM — has always been in the cloud.) These following benefits of cloud migration comprise part of the “why.”

Firstly, cost reduction is a major driver. By shifting from on-premises infrastructure, enterprises eliminate significant upfront capital expenditure on hardware, servers, and ongoing maintenance. Cloud providers manage the infrastructure, updates, and security, allowing for a pay-as-you-go operational expense model that often proves more economical.

Secondly, enhanced scalability and flexibility are critical. Cloud solutions can effortlessly scale computing resources up or down to match fluctuating business demands, such as seasonal peaks or company growth. This agility ensures optimal performance without over-provisioning or the need for costly manual adjustments, a stark contrast to rigid on-premise systems.

Thirdly, improved security and disaster recovery are paramount. Cloud providers invest heavily in robust security measures, including advanced encryption, continuous monitoring, and specialized security teams, often surpassing what individual enterprises can afford. Additionally, built-in disaster recovery and backup capabilities ensure business continuity and data resilience, minimizing downtime in case of unforeseen events.

Finally, cloud migration fosters innovation and accessibility in your enterprise architecture through, among other deliverables, automatic updates with the latest features, including AI and machine learning capabilities, allowing enterprises to leverage cutting-edge technology without manual intervention. This also enables remote access and improved collaboration, empowering employees to work from anywhere and fostering a more agile and competitive business environment.

The benefits are, of course, the promise and the end result. But to get there, the first step is to establish a strategic framework: you gotta have a plan!

Strategy framework for complex cloud migrations

Just as “a good tailor measures twice and cuts once,” a framework for cloud migration is crucial as it ensures the transition aligns with business goals, minimizes disruption, and optimizes costs. It provides a roadmap for selecting the right cloud environment, mitigating risks like data security and downtime, and leveraging cloud benefits such as scalability, agility, and innovation for long-term success.

The good news is that creating a framework doesn’t have to mean starting from scratch. Argano has a long-established, successful template for migration that is easily customized to each client’s specific strategy: establish business objectives, assess current infrastructure, choose a migration model, develop a phased road map, and provide a plan for security and governance.

1. Establish business objectives

Establishing clear business objectives in transforming enterprise technology should be the very first step you take. It acts as the compass guiding the entire migration journey, ensuring that the technological undertaking serves a defined business purpose. Without this crucial initial step, your cloud migration — no matter what cloud: AWS, Azure, SAP, Salesforce, public, private, hybrid — risks becoming a purely technical exercise that may not deliver tangible value or, worse, could negatively impact the organization.

2. Assess current infrastructure

Assessing your current enterprise architecture and infrastructure is the next indispensable step in creating a strategic plan for migrating business applications to the cloud. A comprehensive inventory of existing systems — financial, supply chain management, customer experience, and more — provides a realistic and detailed understanding of your starting point. A thorough assessment prevents costly surprises and ensures that the move to the cloud delivers the anticipated business value.

3. Choose the right migration model

There are both different types and different modes of migration. Regarding modes, there are essentially two established approaches: “the big bang” migration and the phased migration, which are practically self-explanatory: do it all at once, in one fell swoop (a big bang), or migrate slowly, by department, location, etc. In most cases, a phased approach is what works best for the modern enterprise, and it’s where we’ll focus our attention.

In models, there are a few more options. Here are some of the more common ones:

• Rehost: This is the simplest and often the fastest migration model. Applications and their underlying infrastructure (e.g., virtual machines, operating systems, applications) are moved to the cloud with minimal or no changes. It's essentially "lifting" your existing servers/applications from your on-premises data center and "shifting" them to equivalent cloud-based virtual machines or services (Infrastructure as a Service - IaaS).
• Replatform: This model involves making some minor, non-architectural optimizations to an application to take advantage of cloud capabilities, without fundamentally changing its core architecture. A common example is migrating a self-managed database to a cloud-managed database service (e.g., moving from an on-premises SQL Server to Amazon RDS or Azure SQL Database).
• Refactor (Re-architect): This model involves significantly modifying an application's architecture and code to fully leverage cloud-native capabilities and services. This often means breaking down monolithic applications into microservices, adopting serverless computing, using containerization, and integrating with cloud-native
• Cloud-to-cloud: A migration model that refers to the process of moving applications, data, and IT workloads from one cloud service provider to another. This is distinct from the more common "on-premises to cloud" migration, where resources are moved from a company's own data center to a public cloud.

Often, a complete cloud migration strategy will involve a mix of these models across different applications, creating a hybrid approach tailored to the organization's unique needs.

4. Develop a phased roadmap

Developing a phased roadmap is a crucial step when creating a strategic plan for migrating business applications to the cloud. It's essentially your GPS, guiding a complex journey and ensuring you reach your destination efficiently and safely.

Here's why a phased roadmap is so important:

• Reduced Risk: A phased approach allows you to move applications in smaller, manageable groups. This minimizes disruption to business operations and allows you to learn and adapt as you go.
• Prioritization: A roadmap helps you prioritize which applications to migrate first. This is often based on business criticality, cloud readiness, and potential for quick wins.
• Resource Management: Phased migrations allow you to allocate resources (budget, personnel, time) more effectively. You can focus your efforts on one phase at a time, ensuring you have the necessary expertise and capacity.
• Cost Control: By migrating applications in phases, you can better track costs and avoid overspending. You can also optimize your cloud environment as you learn more about your usage patterns.
• Improved Testing: Each phase provides an opportunity to thoroughly test your migration processes, security configurations, and application performance. This helps you identify and resolve issues before they impact a large number of users.
• Enhanced Communication: A roadmap provides a clear timeline and milestones, facilitating communication with stakeholders and ensuring everyone is aligned on the migration plan.
• Flexibility: A phased approach allows you to adjust your strategy as needed. You can learn from each phase and make changes to your plan based on your experiences.
• Business Continuity: By migrating applications in a controlled manner, you can minimize downtime and ensure business continuity throughout the migration process.
• Skill Development: Each phase provides an opportunity for your IT team to develop new skills and gain experience with cloud technologies. This prepares them for future cloud initiatives.
• Demonstrated Value: Phased migrations allow you to deliver value to the business incrementally. You can start with applications that offer quick wins and demonstrate the benefits of cloud migration early on.
• Dependency Management: A roadmap helps you manage application dependencies effectively. You can ensure that applications are migrated in the correct order, avoiding disruptions to dependent systems.
• Compliance: A phased approach allows you to address compliance requirements in a structured manner. You can ensure that each application meets the necessary security and regulatory standards before it's migrated.
• Performance Optimization: Each phase provides an opportunity to optimize application performance in the cloud. You can fine-tune your configurations and ensure that applications are running efficiently.
• Disaster Recovery: A phased approach allows you to implement disaster recovery solutions incrementally. You can ensure that your critical applications are protected from data loss and downtime.

In short, a well-defined phased roadmap is essential for a successful cloud migration. It provides a structured approach, reduces risk, and ensures that your migration aligns with your business objectives.

5. Build in governance, security, and compliance

In most every case, a cloud migration is the first, most crucial step in transforming enterprise technology. Alongside this step — and every other — governance, security, and compliance serve as guiding lights, playing a foundational role in mitigating risk and ensuring successful, sustainable cloud adoption.

Governance built-in ensures alignment with business objectives, defines roles and responsibilities, establishes policies for resource provisioning and management, and sets cost control measures from the outset. This prevents "cloud sprawl," optimizes resource utilization, and ensures accountability.

Security by design means implementing robust identity and access management, data encryption, network security, and threat detection mechanisms from the initial architecture phase. This proactive approach protects sensitive data, prevents breaches, and safeguards against evolving cyber threats, which is far more effective and less costly than retrofitting security.

Compliance embedded in the plan guarantees adherence to regulatory requirements (e.g., HIPAA, GDPR, PCI DSS) and industry standards. This involves continuous monitoring, auditing, and reporting capabilities integrated into cloud operations. Building compliance in avoids costly fines, reputational damage, and legal repercussions, ensuring data residency, privacy, and integrity from the start.

In essence, building in governance, security, and compliance transforms cloud migration from a mere technical lift-and-shift to a strategic business transformation, minimizing risk, maximizing ROI, and fostering long-term operational resilience and trust.

Change management playbook for enterprise-wide adoption

With your migration plan in place, it’s time to turn to ensuring the plan delivers on your investment, and that means user adoption, and that means change management.

Because perhaps more than any technological benefit or deliverable, it’s often change management that impacts cloud migration success the most. Why? Because if your team isn’t using your cloud-based platform, all the work and cost involved in migrating is for nothing.

For a successful cloud migration, the following change management best practices are crucial.

• Training should be tailored to different roles, providing practical skills and fostering confidence in new cloud tools and processes. This mitigates fear of the unknown and equips employees to leverage cloud benefits.
• Stakeholder communication must be continuous, transparent, and multi-directional. Clearly articulate "why" the migration is happening, its benefits, and what it means for each group. Regular updates, feedback channels, and addressing concerns proactively build trust and buy-in.
• Cultural adaptation involves promoting an agile, collaborative, and innovation-focused mindset. Encourage continuous learning, experimentation, and cross-functional teamwork. Leadership must champion the change, demonstrating the desired behaviors and celebrating successes to embed cloud-native practices into the organizational DNA.

Driving long-term value with KPIs and continuous optimization

The truth is that when a cloud migration project is complete and successful, that does not necessarily mean it was a complete success for your business. As part of your overarching success,  ensure you’re measuring the right KPIs over time. Tracking metrics like time-to-migrate, cloud costs, uptime, and performance is essential for enterprise cloud migration.

"Time-to-migrate" gauges efficiency, helping identify bottlenecks and optimize future migrations. "Cloud costs" tracking is crucial for financial control, ensuring the migration stays within budget and delivers expected ROI by identifying over-provisioning or unexpected expenses. "Uptime" and "performance" metrics validate that the cloud environment meets or exceeds pre-migration baselines and SLAs.

For more information on this particular topic, read our guide on key questions for cloud migration strategy.

From insight to action: Next steps for IT leaders

Planning is only ever step one in a journey of many steps. While we have presented many details, the concrete steps you can take now boil down to these:

Define Clear Business Objectives: Begin by establishing "why" the migration is happening from a business perspective. This provides a compass, ensuring the cloud initiative delivers tangible value beyond just technical execution.

Conduct a Thorough Infrastructure Assessment: Take inventory of all current systems and applications. This comprehensive understanding of the existing landscape prevents surprises, optimizes migration strategies, and confirms anticipated business value can be realized.

Develop a Phased Roadmap: Instead of a "big bang," create a detailed, phased plan. This reduces risk, allows for resource optimization, facilitates continuous learning and testing, and ensures business continuity throughout the complex migration journey.

And the most important step? Don’t go it alone. Lean into an experienced cloud migration services provider like Argano with expertise across all major cloud providers and types. Explore our strategic consulting services to turn insight into execution.