Published on: May 09, 2025

Cloud Migration Best Practices for Large Firms

The global cloud computing market has achieved the $947 billion mark in 2025, propelling large enterprises in a race to accelerate digital transformation. Cloud migration is increasingly being seen as something that has to be continuously managed for any company to stay competitive and agile: it is a question of when and how, and not anymore if. Without a proper enterprise cloud migration strategy, an enterprise can face minor or major cost overruns, security breaches, and operational disruptions

Assessing Current Workloads

Before migration, enterprises should undertake an assessment of their existing infrastructure. This step will identify which applications, databases, and workloads could be moved to the cloud, and in which order they should be shifted. This starts off by having a detailed inventory of assets. Applications are classified according to business criticality, patterns of usage, compliance and performance requirements. Some workloads cannot simply be lift and shifted. Some may require re-engineering to be translated there. , a real enterprise cloud migration strategy begins with knowing what is being moved, why it is being moved, and how success is to be measured.

Choosing the Right Cloud Model

There are different types of cloud models that an enterprise can select from: public, private, and hybrid. The choice of the cloud model depends upon its corresponding business objectives, regulatory requirements, budget, and current infrastructure. The public cloud caters to scalability and price efficiencies and is suitable for big data or dynamic workloads or customer-facing applications. However, in a highly regulated industry or for data-intensive operations, additional controls might be necessary.

Migration Strategies

After workloads have been assessed and a cloud model selected, the next step is to define an approach for migration. However, approaches cannot be standardized because each must meet the application's complexity, risk tolerance, and business continuity requirements.

Rehosting (lift and shift): Moving applications as is to the cloud. It is very fast, but often considered a bad practice if not followed up with proper optimization.

Replatforming: Making slight adjustments to applications to prepare them for the cloud, such as updating a database or changing middleware while leaving the core architecture mostly untouched.

Refactor: Writing an application with cloud-native features. Although time-consuming, it is deemed beneficial for long-term scalability and performance.

Retirement: Shutting down obsolete systems during the migration.

Keep on Retaining: Some workloads can be kept on-premise if migrating to the cloud is not feasible or too costly.

Optimizing Post-Migration

The journey doesn’t end after workloads have been moved. Cloud migration best practices place great emphasis on post-phase optimization for long-term efficiency, security, and ROI. Once the migration is done, one of the very first things to begin is performance tuning. It is imperative to monitor the applications in terms of latency, throughput, and resource utilization. Auto-scaling policies should be put in place, enabling the system to increase or reduce compute and storage resources based on demand. This helps avoid situations of overprovisioning and unnecessarily inflated operational costs.

Cost governance is another major focus area. Cloud environment instances tend to encourage excessive overspending unless monitored closely. Enterprises need to equip themselves with cost visibility tools to actively track and manage costs across departments or business units. This would help in ensuring that some measure of accountability is enforced to prevent costs from spiralling out of control.

Ensuring Compliance and Risk Management

For large enterprises, compliance and risk mitigation are equally paramount as the migration itself. These industries—health, finance, and manufacturing—are required to comply with rigorous data protection laws such as GDPR, HIPAA, and SOC 2. These regulations lay down criteria for how data is stored, accessed, encrypted, and audited. Planning compliance into the migration process is usually one of the biggest neglected cloud migration best practices. Organizations need to collaborate with their internal legal and IT security teams to translate their regulatory requirements into the capabilities of their cloud providers. This includes data residency, understanding shared responsibility models, and setting appropriate access controls.

Training and Change Management

Cloud migration is not limited to IT infrastructure; rather, it heavily profiles how people, teams, and departments interact. For large enterprises, a successful cloud migration strategy is intertwined with investments in employee training and structured change management. The best cloud technologies will not begin to produce value unless teams are in place to leverage them.

Training should be:

• For IT professionals (e.g., AWS, Azure, or GCP certifications)
• For business users (e.g., new workflows or interfaces related to cloud tools)

Success Metrics and KPIs

The success of any enterprise cloud migration strategy depends wholly on the capability to measure that very success. Without measurements, one cannot tell if the very promise of cheaper pricing, superior performance, better scalability, and flexibility was delivered by the cloud shift. According to one of the lists of cloud migration best practices, KPIs should be established even before migration. These metrics should support business goals while offering technical and financial analyses. Common examples of success metrics include reducing infrastructure costs, improving application uptime, cutting down page load time, and boosting the frequency of deployment. For example, legacy applications used to be deployed once every quarter. Now, they get deployed every week. This, certainly, is an easily measurable productivity gain. Similarly, if the company spent $1 million a year on data centres and is currently spending $600,000 on cloud costs with better redundancy and disaster recovery, this is a clear ROI.

How does Code1 helps you?

Code1 is referred to as the preferred brand for cloud migrating for large enterprises while guaranteeing a smooth, efficient, and secure transition to the cloud. The company has an array of experience in successfully helping organizations move their infrastructure; thus, its understanding of the intricacies associated with cloud adoption enables it to advise on best practices depending on your business requirements.

Every expert at Code1 is allowed to work on the most crucial inputs of cloud migration, starting from a proper assessment of the existing infrastructure. We ensure that workloads get migrated strategically through lift and shift, re-platform, or full re-engineering of applications. We assist you in making the right choice for the cloud models wherein aspects of scale, security, and compliance come into play.

Final Thoughts

Cloud migration is a massive undertaking, especially for giant businesses that have a complex IT ecosystem. The organizations can tackle the risks and hasten the digital transformation trajectory when cloud migration best practices are followed.

Typically, a deep workload assessment is the starting point for any successful migration, along with a proper model selection, a proper strategic migration approach, and strict post-migration planning. The one thing that keeps IT initiatives consistent with business goals throughout this process is a robust enterprise cloud migration strategy.  Security should also be a prime concern. While setting up hybrid models, following a hybrid cloud security checklist ensures that the core services and sensitive data get protection

Published On: May 09, 2025