Cloud Migration Readiness Checklist

When to Use This Checklist

Use this checklist before committing budget and timelines to a cloud migration program. It works for a single application or a portfolio of hundreds, and it spans AWS, Azure, and Google Cloud. The goal is to surface blockers early, when they are cheap to fix, rather than mid-cutover when they are not.

Readiness is not just technical. A migration fails as often on skills, governance, and cost surprises as it does on architecture. This checklist covers all four.

How to Use This Checklist

Work top to bottom with the application owners and the platform team in the room. Treat the discovery items as gating: you cannot plan waves you have not inventoried. Score each application against the 7 Rs and record the decision and its rationale, because that record drives every later step.

Mark required items as blocking. An item that is not yet green is a risk that needs an owner and a date. Re-run the checklist per migration wave rather than once for the whole program, since each wave carries different data and dependency risk.

What Good Looks Like

A ready program has a complete application inventory, a disposition decision for every workload, and a wave plan sequenced by dependency. Target-state cost is modelled and approved, network connectivity is proven in a proof-of-concept, and data-residency constraints are documented per dataset. The landing zone exists before the first workload moves, and every wave has explicit rollback criteria.

Good programs also have a named owner for each open risk and a communication plan that the business has seen and accepted.

Common Pitfalls

The most common failure is starting to move servers before the landing zone, account structure, and guardrails exist; this creates sprawl that is expensive to unwind. A close second is treating every workload as a rehost ("lift and shift") when some should be retired or repurchased, which carries technical debt straight into the cloud.

Underestimating data transfer time and egress cost derails cutover schedules. So does ignoring the human side: teams without cloud operations skills will struggle to run what they migrated. Finally, missing a rollback plan turns a routine wave problem into an outage.

Related Resources

Pair this with the 7 Rs strategy and the landing-zone best practice, and review the relevant well-architected framework for your target provider. The on-premise-to-cloud migration guides give concrete, provider-specific steps for each wave.