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Migration playbook: On-premises data center → AWS landing zone

On-premises to AWS cloud migration

Move data center workloads to a multi-account AWS landing zone in planned waves, with each workload's dependencies mapped before it moves.

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IT consulting

Migration drivers

Why teams make this move

Driver 01

Hardware refresh and capex

Capital spending on aging servers and maintenance contracts.

Driver 02

Slow provisioning

Weeks or months to procure capacity for a new initiative.

Driver 03

Disaster recovery gaps

No adequate secondary site, so a regional outage risks extended downtime or data loss.

Execution sequence

How the migration runs

Each phase ends with a check you can verify — data parity, error rates, latency — and the rollback path is agreed before any traffic moves.

  1. 01Phase

    Portfolio discovery and TCO

    Cataloging workloads and dependencies, choosing a 6R strategy for each, and sizing the target architecture.

  2. 02Phase

    Landing zone and connectivity

    Setting up a multi-account landing zone with AWS Control Tower, plus hybrid connectivity (Direct Connect or VPN) sized to the sync traffic.

  3. 03Phase

    Workload migration

    Rehosting or replatforming in waves — VMs, containers on EKS or ECS, managed databases — through automated pipelines.

  4. 04Phase

    Data cutover and validation

    Continuous database replication with AWS DMS, validation, then a DNS cutover for each wave.

Risk prevention

Pitfalls that derail this migration

Risk 01

Lift-and-shift overspending

Moving oversized VM specs straight to on-demand EC2 without right-sizing.

Risk 02

Underestimating data transfer costs

Not budgeting for data transfer and hybrid connectivity during the months both environments run.

Risk 03

Security perimeter gaps

Carrying flat-network assumptions into the cloud instead of least-privilege IAM and segmented networks.

Before and after

What we measure

We take a baseline before any change and report the same numbers after cutover, from your own tools. They are the evidence of whether the migration worked — not figures promised in advance.

Run cost
Data center cost per workload vs its AWS cost after right-sizing
Recovery time
Measured in a restore and failover test, not estimated
IaC coverage
Share of AWS resources defined in Terraform, reported per wave

Questions

Frequently asked migration questions

Six strategies for each workload: rehost (lift and shift), replatform (for example to managed databases or containers), repurchase, refactor, retire and retain. We choose per workload, not for the whole estate.

Data in transit is encrypted (TLS, plus IPsec VPN or MACsec on supported Direct Connect links), data at rest is encrypted with AWS KMS keys you control, and access to migration tooling is limited and logged.

Rehearse the cutover before the real one

Tell us about your data volume, traffic and timeline. An engineer will reply within one business day to set up a call about the migration plan and its rollback path.

Request a strategy call