What Is Cloud Migration? Benefits, Strategies, And Steps

Why companies migrate to the cloud

Understanding what is cloud migration is one thing; understanding why businesses pursue it is another. The short answer is that on-premise infrastructure is expensive to maintain, hard to scale, and slow to adapt when your business needs change. Most companies don't start a migration project because it sounds exciting. They start because staying put grows more painful than making the move.

Cost structure shifts from capital to operational spending

One of the biggest motivators is cost predictability. Owning physical servers means you pay upfront for hardware, then keep paying for power, cooling, maintenance, and replacement cycles. You're also paying for peak capacity even when you don't need it. When you move to the cloud, you shift from large capital expenditures (CapEx) to a pay-as-you-go operational model. You only pay for what you use, and you stop over-provisioning hardware that sits idle most of the time.

According to Amazon Web Services, organizations reduce IT infrastructure costs by 30 to 40 percent on average after completing a well-planned cloud migration.

Scalability that matches your actual demand

On-premise setups require you to plan capacity months or even years in advance. If you underestimate demand, your systems slow down or fail under load. If you overestimate, you burn budget on unused hardware that collects dust. Cloud infrastructure removes this tradeoff by letting you scale resources up or down in minutes, not months. A retail company can handle five times normal traffic during a sale without pre-purchasing five times the servers.

Beyond raw scaling, the cloud also gives your engineering teams faster deployment cycles. Developers can spin up new environments, run tests, and ship features without waiting on hardware procurement or lengthy IT provisioning. That speed directly affects how fast you can respond to market changes and customer needs.

Security and compliance improvements

Many teams assume that keeping data on their own servers is inherently safer. In practice, major cloud providers like AWS, Azure, and Google Cloud invest billions annually in security infrastructure, threat detection, and compliance certifications that most internal IT departments simply can't replicate at the same scale. These providers maintain certifications across dozens of regulatory frameworks, including HIPAA, SOC 2, and ISO 27001.

Security in the cloud operates on a shared responsibility model, where the provider secures the underlying infrastructure and you secure what you build on top of it. Working with an experienced cloud partner helps you configure access controls, set up monitoring, and apply security best practices from the start, which significantly reduces your exposure to breaches, misconfigurations, and compliance failures down the line.

Common types of cloud migration

When you start exploring what is cloud migration more deeply, one of the first decisions you face is where you're migrating to. Not every cloud environment works the same way, and the right choice depends on your security requirements, budget, and workload characteristics. There are three main environments most companies choose from, and each comes with a distinct set of tradeoffs.

Public cloud

A public cloud is infrastructure owned and operated by a third-party provider, such as AWS, Microsoft Azure, or Google Cloud. You access it over the internet and share the underlying hardware with other customers, though your data stays logically isolated from other tenants. Public cloud works well for most business applications, especially when you want fast scalability, broad service availability, and minimal infrastructure management overhead.

AWS, Azure, and Google Cloud together account for over 65 percent of global cloud infrastructure spending, making public cloud the dominant migration destination for most organizations.

Private cloud

Dedicated infrastructure that runs exclusively for your organization is called a private cloud. You can host it in your own data center or through a managed provider. Private cloud gives you greater control over security and compliance configurations, which makes it a common choice in regulated industries like healthcare and finance. The tradeoff is higher cost and more internal maintenance compared to public cloud options.

Hybrid and multi-cloud

Many companies land somewhere in between, running a hybrid cloud setup that combines on-premise infrastructure with one or more public cloud environments. A multi-cloud approach takes this further by distributing workloads across multiple providers to avoid vendor lock-in and optimize performance by region. Both models require careful architecture planning, but they offer flexibility that neither a purely private nor purely public setup can match on its own.

Cloud migration strategies using the 6 Rs

Once you understand what is cloud migration at a conceptual level, the next challenge is deciding how to move each workload. Not every application migrates the same way. AWS popularized the 6 Rs framework to help teams categorize their migration approach for each workload based on complexity, cost, and the level of change required.

The 6 Rs prevent you from applying a one-size-fits-all approach to your infrastructure, which is one of the most common reasons migrations go over budget and over schedule.

The six strategies at a glance

Each of the six strategies represents a different level of effort and a different outcome. The table below breaks them down:

How to pick the right approach for each workload

Your decision depends on how critical the application is to your business and how much technical debt it carries going into the migration. Rehosting moves the fastest and works well when your primary goal is exiting on-premise hardware quickly. Refactoring takes longer but gives you the strongest long-term return by unlocking autoscaling, managed services, and cloud-native resilience. Most real-world migrations use a combination of strategies applied across different parts of the stack rather than a single approach for everything.

Cloud migration steps from planning to optimization

Understanding what is cloud migration in theory is useful, but executing one successfully requires a structured, repeatable process. Skipping early phases is where most teams run into serious trouble, so following a clear sequence protects both your timeline and your budget before a single workload moves.

Discover and assess your current environment

Before moving anything, you need a complete inventory of your existing infrastructure. Catalog every application, database, server, and dependency in your environment, then evaluate each workload for complexity, interdependencies, and business criticality. This inventory becomes the foundation for every architectural and sequencing decision you make downstream, so don't rush it.

A thorough discovery phase separates smooth migrations from chaotic ones. Skipping it almost always leads to costly surprises mid-project.

Build your migration plan and prioritize workloads

With your assessment complete, build a prioritized migration roadmap that sequences workloads from lowest to highest risk. Your plan should define the following before you touch any production system:

• Target architecture for each workload
• Performance benchmarks and acceptance criteria
• A rollback plan for each migration wave

Start with self-contained, lower-risk applications to build team confidence and validate your process before moving mission-critical systems into the new environment.

Execute, validate, and optimize

During execution, move workloads in planned waves rather than all at once. After each wave, run validation tests to confirm that applications perform correctly, data integrity holds, and security configurations are in place. Keep your original environment intact until each wave is confirmed stable and performing within your benchmarks.

Post-migration optimization is where you capture the real payoff. Use tools like AWS Cost Explorer to right-size instances and eliminate idle resources, and monitor cost, performance, and security continuously as your usage patterns become clearer over time.

Common challenges and how to avoid them

Even with a solid plan, executing what is cloud migration exposes teams to predictable pitfalls that derail timelines and inflate budgets. Knowing where projects typically break down before you start gives you a real advantage over teams that learn these lessons the hard way.

Underestimating the true cost of migration

Many teams underestimate costs by focusing only on compute and storage line items. The real cost drivers often sit in data egress fees, licensing changes, and the engineering hours required to reconfigure applications post-migration. Build a detailed cost model before committing to a timeline, one that accounts for networking, support tiers, and the transitional period when you're running both environments simultaneously.

Scope creep is another cost trap. Workloads that appear straightforward during planning often reveal unexpected complexity once the actual move begins. Setting clear scope boundaries per migration wave and tracking actual spend against your model weekly helps you catch overruns early, before they compound across your entire project.

Security gaps and hidden application dependencies

Moving data between environments creates a window where security misconfigurations are most likely to surface. Unencrypted transfers, overly permissive IAM policies, and misconfigured storage buckets are among the most common issues teams encounter during active migration windows. Audit your access controls and encryption settings at every stage, and run automated security scans before you decommission your original environment.

Misconfigurations are the leading cause of cloud data breaches, according to research from the Cloud Security Alliance.

Legacy applications frequently carry undocumented dependencies on specific network configurations or local file paths that only surface once you move the workload. Building a complete dependency map during your discovery phase and running staged tests in a non-production environment before each wave keeps these surprises from reaching your production systems.

Next steps for your cloud move

Now that you have a clear picture of what is cloud migration, including the strategies, steps, and common pitfalls, the real work is putting that knowledge into action. Starting with a thorough discovery and assessment of your current environment is the single most important step before anything else moves. Document your workloads, map your dependencies, and set measurable performance and cost goals so your migration has a defined target to hit, not just a general direction to drift toward.

Executing a migration without the right technical partner often means learning expensive lessons under real production pressure. Working with a team that brings deep AWS expertise lets you skip the most common mistakes and move faster without cutting corners on security or architecture. If you're ready to plan your cloud move and want a team that treats your project like a genuine partnership, contact Brilworks to get started today.