Compute is the easy part
Moving a virtual machine to a cloud provider is a solved problem. What stalls migrations is everything around it: how users and sites reach the workload, how it authenticates, where its data lives, and what latency the application silently assumed when it sat two racks away from its database.
Discover before you design
A migration plan built from a CMDB export is a plan built on hope. We start with automated discovery — pulling actual topology, addressing, flows and dependencies from the environment — so the design reflects what is really talking to what. That single step removes most of the 'unknown dependency' surprises during cutover.
Design the connectivity and security layer first
- Hybrid connectivity: SD-WAN or dedicated links, redundancy, and a routing design that survives a provider fault.
- Identity and access: who and what can reach the workload, enforced consistently on-premises and in cloud.
- Segmentation and policy that travel with the workload rather than being rebuilt per environment.
- Data gravity: co-locate chatty services; migrate the database and the application as a unit, not on different weekends.
- Observability from day one — you cannot troubleshoot a hybrid estate you cannot see.
Modernise where it pays, lift where it doesn't
Not every workload deserves re-architecture. A pragmatic migration groups applications into lift-and-shift, re-platform (managed database, containers) and rebuild — and commits engineering effort to the small set where modernisation changes the business outcome. Data warehouse modernisation is often in that set; a decade-old departmental app usually is not.
The result is a migration that lands on time because the network, security and data decisions were made deliberately at the start — not discovered during cutover.