Is Your Business Ready for the Cloud? Six Decisions Before Migration
A cloud migration can change where an application runs without resolving how the business operates it.
Before approving a move, leadership should understand who owns the service, who can change it, how it will recover, and what it will cost to maintain.
A readiness review turns those questions into decisions. It can also reveal that a phased migration—or improving the current environment first—is the better next step.
1. What business outcome justifies the move?
Choose a specific objective: supporting growth, improving recovery, replacing aging infrastructure, or enabling a new capability.
Define how you will evaluate that objective after migration.
Avoid treating lower cost or better performance as automatic outcomes. Compare the proposed architecture with the current service using the same workload assumptions and operating requirements.
2. Who owns each responsibility?
Cloud services change the division of responsibility; they do not eliminate the customer’s responsibilities.
AWS describes this through its shared responsibility model, with customer duties varying by the services selected. AWS shared responsibility model. Amazon Web Services (AWS)
Create a short ownership register covering identity, application configuration, data protection, monitoring, recovery, and incident response.
An entry such as “the provider handles security” is too broad to guide operations.
3. Who needs access—and who can grant more?
List the people, integrations, and workloads that need access.
Separate normal work from privileged administration. Decide how access will be approved, reviewed, and removed. Include an emergency-access process that can be monitored and checked afterward.
The business tradeoff is between convenient access and the potential consequences of an account being misused. The goal is enough access to operate effectively, with clear limits and accountability.
4. What does recovery need to achieve?
Ask process owners how long the service can be unavailable and how much recent data they can afford to lose.
Those answers should inform the architecture and recovery plan.
A backup configuration is only part of the answer. Before go-live, define a restore exercise that checks whether the application, data, dependencies, and user access can be recovered together.
Record who will make decisions during an outage.
5. What evidence will you need when something goes wrong?
Identify the questions your team must be able to answer about access, changes, and failures.
Then specify the records needed, who reviews alerts, and how long evidence must remain available.
NIST’s incident-response guidance, finalized on April 3, 2025, places incident response within broader cybersecurity risk management. The practical implication for migration planning is to prepare response capabilities before an incident occurs. NIST SP 800-61 Revision 3. csrc.nist.gov
6. What is the full operating cost?
Include more than compute and storage:
Backup and recovery resources.
Monitoring and security tooling.
Data transfer and integration.
Support and staff time.
Ongoing maintenance and access reviews.
Compare options at the same service level. A cheaper design with a slower recovery capability is a different business proposition.
Turn the review into a go-live decision
A useful readiness report should identify:
The workload and business objective.
Material gaps and their consequences.
Owners and required actions.
Evidence required before launch.
Accepted risks and approval authority.
Rollback or contingency arrangements.
The outcome may be “ready,” “ready after these actions,” or “not yet justified.”
That clarity is valuable. It helps prevent a migration deadline from becoming an assumption that the service is ready.
Up In Mars can help structure a cloud-readiness review and translate the findings into a practical migration plan. Explore our Cloud Migration services or contact us to discuss your workload and business goals.