Azure Cloud Migration Checklist

Akins IT • April 7, 2022
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Back in 2015, Akins IT started working with Azure and helping organizations in the commercial, government, academic, and non-profit sector with their cloud initiatives. As IT professionals, its really exciting to see a product mature and evolve. Cloud adoption is being considered by more and more organizations around the world. In fact, some organizations and countries mandate it. Cloud migrations are nothing new, in fact, If you have used and/or migrated to Office 365, DropBox, Sharepoint, Zoom, Google Drive, Gmail, among many others, then you and your organization are already in the cloud. After the pandemic, we saw an increased demand for cloud services and our existing partners who we helped migrate to the cloud were ready for the remote workforce and adapt rapidly and securely. Migrating to the cloud can be overwhelming and daunting, however, we can follow the Cloud Adoption Framework. The Cloud Adoption Framework brings together cloud adoption best practices from Microsoft employees, partners, and customers. It provides a set of tools, guidance, and narratives. These tools help shape your technology, business, and people strategies to get the best business outcomes during your cloud adoption effort. 


Review the guidance for each methodology below: 

Lifecycle


Define Strategy: In this step, we define and document your motivations, document business outcomes, evaluate financial considerations, and discover the technical flexibility, efficiencies, and capabilities that help you build a business case to adopt the cloud. 

 

Plan: We inventory and rationalize your digital estate, establish a plan for initial organization alignment, create a plan for addressing readiness, and develop a cloud adoption plan. 

 

Ready: We explore cloud operating model, evaluate target architecture, and deployment approach. 

 

Migrate & Innovate: We evaluate the migration workloads, migration scenarios, best practices, process improvements, develop new cloud-native or hybrid solutions. 

 

Govern: We build methodologies and processes, best practices, and align corporate policies, processes, and tooling. 

 

Manage: Document supported workloads, define criticality classifications, cloud management tools, and processes. This step helps develop the business and technical approaches needed to provide cloud management that powers ongoing operations. 


Cloud Adoption Strategy Evaluator 


You can assess your cloud adoption strategy and get recommendations on building or advancing your cloud business case. It takes about 10 minutes and will help you define a migration strategy. 


How does Akins IT help you develop a cloud migration strategy? 


With many years of Azure experience and early Azure adopters, we have refined our processes, methodologies, technical approach, and cost savings which translates to customer success. As a Tier 1 Microsoft Gold Partner, our customers benefit from advanced support from us and Microsoft, licenses procured directly from Microsoft, trials and licensing audits, among many more! 

 

For more information on why partner with a CSP


We specialize in Azure and Microsoft services. From our sales and architects team to understand your business needs, goals, and budget, to our engineers with vast knowledge and experience, among Microsoft certifications, that help us deliver and implement a successful cloud migration. 

 

See our success stories by our customers here 

By Shawn Akins October 20, 2025
October 20, 2025 — Early today, Amazon Web Services experienced a major incident centered in its US‑EAST‑1 (N. Virginia) region. AWS reports the event began around 12:11 a.m. PT and tied back to DNS resolution affecting DynamoDB , with mitigation within a couple of hours and recovery continuing thereafter. As the outage rippled, popular services like Snapchat, Venmo, Ring, Roblox, Fortnite , and even some Amazon properties saw disruptions before recovering. If your apps or data are anchored to a single cloud, a morning like this can turn into a help‑desk fire drill. A multi‑cloud or cloud‑smart approach helps you ride through these moments with minimal end‑user impact. What happened (and why it matters) Single‑region fragility: US‑EAST‑1 is massive—and when it sneezes, the internet catches a cold. Incidents here have a history of wide blast radius. Shared dependencies: DNS issues to core services (like DynamoDB endpoints) can cascade across workloads that never directly “touch” that service. Multi‑cloud: practical resilience, not buzzwords For mid‑sized orgs, schools, and local government, multi‑cloud doesn’t have to mean “every app in every cloud.” It means thoughtful redundancy where it counts : Multi‑region or multi‑provider failover for critical apps Run active/standby across AWS and Azure (or another provider), or at least across two AWS regions with automated failover. Start with citizen‑facing portals, SIS/LMS access, emergency comms, and payment gateways. Portable platforms Use Kubernetes and containers, keep state externalized, and standardize infra with Terraform/Ansible so you can redeploy fast when a region (or a provider) wobbles. (Today’s DNS hiccup is exactly the kind of scenario this protects against.) Resilient data layers Replicate data asynchronously across clouds/regions; choose databases with cross‑region failover and test RPO/RTO quarterly. If you rely on a managed database tied to one region, design an escape hatch. Traffic and identity that float Use global traffic managers/DNS to shift users automatically; keep identity (MFA/SSO) highly available and not hard‑wired to a single provider’s control plane. Run the playbook Document health checks, automated cutover, and comms templates. Then practice —tabletops and live failovers. Many services today recovered within hours, but only teams with rehearsed playbooks avoided user‑visible downtime. The bottom line Cloud concentration risk is real. Outages will happen—what matters is whether your constituents, students, and staff feel it. A pragmatic multi‑cloud stance limits the blast radius and keeps your mission‑critical services online when one provider has a bad day. Need a resilience check? Akins IT can help you prioritize which systems should be multi‑cloud, design the right level of redundancy, and validate your failover plan—without overspending. Let’s start with a quick, 30‑minute review of your most critical services and RPO/RTO targets. (No slideware, just actionable next steps.)
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