I look for these things before touching even a single computer in any migration

The pre-migration checklist most people skip:

Full dependency map. Not what the team thinks is running. What is actually running in the environment. These are rarely the same thing.

Data integrity baseline. A snapshot of what exists before migration starts. Without it, post-migration validation is comparison against memory, which is not validation.

Identity audit. Every account that needs to move or be recreated. User accounts, service accounts, groups, permissions. All of it, before the first batch runs.

Tested rollback procedure. If cutover fails at hour two, what is the specific path back and how long does it take? “Restore from backup” is not an answer. A timed, practiced procedure is.

Stakeholder communication timeline. From pre-migration briefing through Hyper Care, who needs what information and when. Assumed communication is not communication.

These are not technical steps. They are discipline steps. The difference between a migration that holds under pressure and one that gets improvised at 2am usually traces back to whether this list existed before the window opened.

What would you add and what’s the one item you’ve seen skipped most often?

#Migration #IT #CloudMigration