How to plan a cloud migration without downtime

For the full programme blueprint, read our Enterprise Cloud Migration Strategy.

Cloud migrations fail when teams treat them as a lift-and-shift weekend project. The teams that succeed define cutover criteria early, rehearse rollback, and move traffic in controlled stages.

1. Inventory applications, data stores, identities, and network dependencies.
2. Rank workloads by business criticality and migration complexity.
3. Choose rehost, replatform, or rebuild per workload.
4. Pilot on a lower-risk service first.
5. Cut over with blue-green or canary releases and a rehearsed rollback.