6 Essentials for a Successful Cloud Migration
Picture this: You’re making lasagna. In order to achieve a culinary masterpiece, you wouldn’t just toss random ingredients in a baking dish and hope for the best. Instead, you’d start with a recipe and carefully layer pasta, marinara, and ricotta. Skip those steps, and what comes out of the oven wouldn’t be lasagna. Cloud migration works the same way.
Before a business can take advantage of everything the cloud has to offer — eating the delicious lasagna in our metaphor’s case — foundational steps must be taken internally. At JetSweep, we’ve found the businesses that have the most success migrating to the cloud have six key ingredients in place before they make the leap.
1. Define Your Business Goals
Why are you moving to the cloud? Is the goal to reduce costs by eliminating expensive hardware? Scale more quickly to support customer growth? Modernize workloads for better performance? Improve security posture and compliance?
Defining goals creates a roadmap for decision-making throughout the migration process. It informs which workloads move first, how resources are allocated, and what success ultimately looks like. Without this clarity, it’s easy to overspend, overcomplicate, or underdeliver.
2. Evaluate Your Current Infrastructure
Before you can decide what belongs in the cloud, you need a clear picture of the infrastructure you already have in place. Start with a thorough inventory: applications, workloads, data, dependencies, and compliance requirements. Identify which systems are mission-critical and which could be retired or consolidated. Some workloads may be cloud-ready today, while others might need to be refactored to take advantage of cloud-native features.
3. Choose the Right Vendor
It’s important to choose a cloud provider that aligns with your goals. Amazon Web Services (AWS), for example, leads the market with its unmatched service offerings, global infrastructure, and proven maturity. It’s often the go-to for businesses looking to innovate quickly and scale securely.
But choosing a vendor isn’t just about technology — it’s also about partnership. The right cloud provider should support your long-term business strategy and help you navigate that complexity. Of course, having the right cloud provider is only half the equation. You also need a migration partner to help set you up for success in the cloud. As an Advanced AWS Consulting Partner, we’ve guided countless organizations through the Migration Acceleration Program.
4. Train Your Team
Traditional on-premises IT practices don’t always map neatly to cloud operations. And without the right skills, your team can end up frustrated or underutilized.
Investing in training pays off quickly. AWS offers Ramp-Up Guides, certifications, and on-demand courses to help build the necessary expertise. Employees that are given the chance to learn before, during, and after migration can feel more confident and empowered to innovate, and find new ways to use cloud-native services for efficiency, automation, and better customer experiences.
5. Secure Executive Buy-In
Migrating to the cloud impacts more than just IT. Finance teams need to adjust to new cost models. Operations teams need to rethink processes. Compliance and security functions need to align with new standards.
The most successful migrations we’ve seen are those where leadership communicates the “why” behind the move, connects it to company-wide goals, and ensures resources are available to support the transition. That’s why it’s critical to secure buy-in from the executive team. Leaders set the tone for the organization, and when they champion the migration, it builds confidence and morale. Without executive support, teams may see the move as an isolated IT project rather than a business-wide transformation.
6. Set Realistic Expectations
The cloud gets plenty of hype, and for good reason. Done right, it can reduce costs, speed up innovation, strengthen security, and help you scale on demand. But those benefits don’t happen automatically after a lift-and-shift migration.
The real value comes after the move, when workloads are optimized and cloud-native services are fully leveraged. For example, tools like AWS Cost Explorer, AWS Security Hub, and automation frameworks can take efficiency and security to the next level. But they require intentional implementation.
Many businesses stumble at this point in their migration journey by expecting instant results without ongoing optimization. Setting realistic expectations ensures that teams see migration as the beginning of a journey, not the finish line.
The Recipe for Success
A successful cloud migration can establish the foundation of how your business will operate for years to come. Just like building a lasagna, the best results come when you prepare properly, use the right ingredients, and follow a proven process.
At JetSweep, we help businesses move beyond the migration itself to build cloud environments that are secure, cost-efficient, and primed for growth. By aligning technology with business goals, we make sure the cloud gives your business the agility and resilience to thrive in whatever comes next.