The Cloud Diaries: Your First Year After Migration
At this point in your cloud migration journey, you’re hopefully starting to feel like a pro. You’ve been off prem for a year now — you’ve moved workloads, adapted to the inevitable learning curve, and started to see the cloud’s agility at work.
Most companies enter year two with a mix of stable infrastructure, lingering inefficiencies, and questions about where to focus next. This is the time to step back, assess your environment, and start transforming your cloud from a place where workloads run into a platform that accelerates your business.
1. Clean Up What You Built in Year One
Organizations often spend their first year in Amazon Web Services (AWS) stabilizing workloads, learning the platform, and keeping everything running smoothly. But year one decisions — even good ones — are often made under pressure and with limited visibility.
Now is the time to strengthen the foundation.
Normalize Costs
As your cloud environment scales and usage patterns adjust to real business needs, it’s not uncommon for the expense of AWS to be higher than expected in the first year. These initial spikes often reflect temporary factors like migrating workloads, running test environments, and experimenting with new services.
Stabilize costs by focusing on the fundamentals:
Tag your resources so spending is visible and traceable
Right-size instances (most are larger than they need to be)
Clean up unneeded volumes, snapshots, and idle resources
Adopt the first phase of a FinOps practice
Contact us to learn more about our cost optimization assessment.
Tighten Security Across the Organization
In year one, many companies focus on getting workloads live and secure enough to operate confidently. As your cloud footprint grows, it’s natural to take a closer look at access controls and configurations to ensure your environment stays prepared for the what ifs.
Key areas to tackle now include:
Review and clean up IAM roles and permissions
Confirm encryption and logging are consistent
Turn on GuardDuty, Inspector, and other baseline security services
Establish organization-wide guardrails and policies
Ensure vulnerability scanning is active
Learn more about our security assessment.
Conduct a Well-Architected Framework Review
If you only invest in one assessment after your first year, make it this one. A Well-Architected Framework Review helps companies:
Identify architecture risks
Spot cost optimization opportunities
Improve reliability and resiliency
Create a clear, prioritized roadmap
Our Well-Architected Framework Review evaluates your AWS environment against best practices across security, reliability, performance, cost, and operational excellence, delivering a prioritized roadmap to reduce risk and optimize your cloud infrastructure.
2. Automate Anything That’s Slowing You Down
Reduce risk, increase speed, and free your team from routine maintenance with automation. Start with these high-impact areas:
Infrastructure as Code
CI/CD pipelines
Automated patching
Scheduled backups and snapshot lifecycle policies
Environment deployments with consistent patterns
The goal? To eliminate repetitive tasks so your team can focus on modernization and innovation.
3. Start Modernizing (One Workload at a Time)
Now that you’re stable and automated, modernization becomes your biggest lever for efficiency and long-term value. But modernization doesn’t need to be — and shouldn’t be — an all-or-nothing effort.
Choose a single workload to pilot, such as moving to a managed database to reduce operational overhead, containerizing an application to improve portability, exploring serverless for event-driven or variable workloads, or adopting services like S3, DynamoDB, or Lambda where appropriate. Even one modernized workload can reduce costs, improve performance, and shorten release cycles.
4. Build a Basic Resilience Plan (Because You Now Rely on AWS)
During the first year, most organizations focus on getting things running. But once your business depends on AWS, resilience becomes essential.
This doesn’t require a complex multi-region strategy. Start practical:
Define your RTO/RPO for each critical workload
Confirm your backups are running and test a restore
Document your recovery process in a simple, accessible runbook
Identify single points of failure and address the highest-risk items
5. Invest in Your Team’s Cloud Skills
A year in, teams need deeper knowledge not just to maintain the environment, but to evolve it efficiently. Skill gaps become obvious, and without structured upskilling, projects slow, mistakes happen, and opportunities to leverage new services are missed. AWS offers a wide range of cloud training resources to accelerate team development — from role-based learning paths and hands-on labs to certification programs and self-paced training through AWS Skill Builder.
Building What Comes Next
Reaching your first cloud anniversary is something to celebrate. But the real opportunity — innovation, efficiency, long-term ROI — happens in the year that follows. Companies that invest in optimization, automation, modernization, resiliency, and skills compound value over time.
If you want help assessing where to focus next or building a plan for year two, JetSweep helps organizations turn “we migrated” into “we’re optimized, secure, and moving faster than ever.”