Cloud migrations succeed or fail on a handful of checkpoints that rarely appear on marketing slides. Treat them as gates—not suggestions—before the first production cutover.

1. Landing zone ready

Accounts, identity, networking, logging, and baseline security should exist before workloads move. Migrating into an improvised account is how outages and access chaos begin.

2. Dependency map signed off

Know what talks to what. Hidden file shares, batch jobs, and vendor VPNs are the usual surprises. A signed dependency map is the difference between a planned cutover and a scramble.

3. Rehearsal with rollback criteria

Run the cutover once in a controlled window. Document how you decide to proceed or roll back. If rollback is undefined, you do not have a plan—you have hope.

4. Day-two operations

Monitoring, on-call ownership, cost alerts, and runbooks must be named before go-live. Migration is not done when DNS flips; it is done when operators can sleep.

Need a migration partner who treats these as non-negotiable? See our cloud migration service or book a checkpoint review.