Every migration has a cutover window — a period where systems are offline or in transition. That’s expected. Organizations can plan around it.

What they can’t plan around is unplanned downtime: a cutover that runs three hours past the window, a rollback nobody has practiced, a dependency nobody found that takes an application offline the morning after go-live.

These don’t happen randomly. They happen when the cutover wasn’t tested, the rollback procedure was never validated, and Hyper Care was unstaffed or closed too early.

A well-planned migration with a generous cutover window is almost always less disruptive than a compressed one that tries to minimize downtime but hasn’t accounted for what happens when something breaks at 2am and the options are limited.

Planned downtime is a feature of a well-run migration. Unplanned downtime is what you get when you skip the work that prevents it.

What’s the unplanned outage that’s hit you mid-migration — and what did it trace back to?

#Migration #CloudMigration #IT