The Biggest Risk in a Cloud Migration Isn't the Cloud
Your team is tired of babysitting aging servers and paying for capacity nobody uses. The cloud fixes that. But most migrations don't fail because a company picked the wrong provider. They fail from skipped steps, undocumented dependencies, and security gaps that surface after go live. Companies list cost savings as the top reason to move, yet overspending is the most common complaint once they get there.
Build the Landing Zone Before Anything Else Moves
A landing zone is the foundation every workload lands on. It covers identity controls, network rules, logging, and encryption defaults, all configured before migration day. Skip it and you don't get a faster start, you get an ungoverned cloud account with weak security and no visibility. Identity and access management, secure network connectivity, central logging, and secrets management all need to be live before any sensitive data moves. Cloud providers secure their own infrastructure, but you are still responsible for how you configure everything inside it.
Map Every Dependency Before You Move a Single Workload
An application that looks standalone often isn't. It may share a database with another system, or authenticate through an old on premises system nobody documented. Move it without checking those connections first, and something breaks downstream. The practical fix: map every dependency, group workloads into waves by criticality, and prove the approach with one pilot before you scale. Once that pilot holds up, the rest of the migration becomes a repeatable process instead of a string of surprises.
