The Migration Mirage
Cloud vendors make migration look straightforward. In practice, the technical work is often the easy part. The hard parts — data governance decisions, application refactoring, network architecture, and cultural change — are where migrations slow down, overspend, or fail entirely.
The Five Things Nobody Tells You
1. Your True Costs Are Hidden Until You Move
On-premises cost models are opaque. Until you migrate, you often do not know the true cost of each workload — which makes cloud cost projections unreliable. The best migrations start with a workload cost inventory, not a headline quote.
2. Your Applications Were Not Designed for the Cloud
Most applications running on legacy infrastructure were built with assumptions that do not hold in cloud environments — static IP expectations, session affinity, local file system dependencies. A lift-and-shift gets them to the cloud; it does not make them cloud-native.
3. Network Architecture Becomes Critical
On-premises, most applications share a flat network. In cloud, network design — VPCs, subnets, peering, security groups — becomes a primary architecture concern. Getting this wrong early creates expensive rework.
4. Change Management Is the Long Tail
Infrastructure teams adapt quickly. Application developers take longer. Business teams who rely on tools and processes tied to on-premises infrastructure take longest of all. Plan for change management to last months after go-live.
5. FinOps Is Not Optional
Cloud cost governance — tagging, alerting, Reserved Instance planning — must be designed before migration, not bolted on after the first unexpected bill. The organisations that master FinOps early get 25–40% more value from their cloud spend.
The Bottom Line
A successful cloud migration is 20% technical and 80% organisational. Plan accordingly.