Four steps that every migration that goes well follows

The same structure holds across environments, tools, and scale.

Assessment and planning. Understand the environment before you touch it. Not the documented version of it. The actual one running in production.

Environment preparation. Get the source and destination ready, not just configured. Licenses pre-assigned, identity validated, stakeholders briefed. Preparation that stops at the technical layer leaves gaps that show up at cutover.

Execution. The part everyone watches. Also the shortest phase when the first two were done correctly. When it runs long, the answer is almost always in what got skipped earlier.

Validation. Confirm it actually worked against a baseline, not against memory. Stay close to the environment while it settles. The issues that surface during Hyper Care are usually the ones nobody went looking for proactively.

Skipping steps doesn’t save time. It moves the work to after cutover, where it costs more, takes longer, and happens in front of users instead of before them.

What would you add to this structure and where do you see the most time lost in projects you have been part of?

#Migration #IT #CloudMigration