Cloud migration plans usually start with promises of agility, lower capital expenditure, and easier remote access. Those benefits only materialize when the move is preceded by a detailed audit of systems, data flows, and contracts that exposes weak points before they reach the new environment.
During planning sessions, it is tempting to escape into small distractions or casual games, perhaps trying balloon game online between meetings. Short breaks can reset attention, but they should not replace a disciplined pre-migration audit.
1. Inventory Systems and Dependencies
The first audit layer is a precise map of what you already run. Many organizations underestimate how many shadow systems, legacy scripts, and undocumented integrations keep daily operations moving. Moving to cloud-only infrastructure without seeing this landscape clearly turns migration into guesswork.
Useful questions for this stage include:
- Which applications are mission-critical, and which are lower priority or experimental?
- Which services depend on on-premises hardware, local file shares, or custom appliances?
- Which integrations rely on hard-coded IP addresses, ports, or network paths?
- Which teams or roles rely on each system during a normal workday?
A clear inventory reduces surprises later and allows you to group systems into sensible migration waves instead of moving everything in one risky leap.
2. Audit Data, Compliance, and Retention
Once systems are mapped, you must examine the data that flows through them. Cloud-only models change where data resides, who can access it, and how regulators view your risk profile. A superficial review that focuses only on storage capacity can miss serious compliance gaps.
Start by classifying data according to sensitivity. Customer records, payment information, health data, intellectual property, and internal metrics all carry different legal and business obligations. Jurisdiction also matters, because data stored in one region may be subject to different disclosure and retention rules than data stored in another.
Key elements to review include:
- Which datasets qualify as personally identifiable information or fall under sector-specific laws
- Where data currently lives, including backups, archives, and developer copies.
- How long you are required to retain various data categories and who enforces those rules.
- Which cloud regions and providers can meet your regulatory and contractual obligations.
- How you will prove compliance during audits once systems run entirely in the cloud.
This audit often reveals the need for stricter access controls, improved logging, and clearer data-lifecycle policies before and after the migration.
3. Examine Security, Identity, and Access
Cloud-only systems concentrate risk. A compromised identity or misconfigured permission set can expose far more than a single local server. Before migration, you need a sober look at how authentication, authorization, and security monitoring will operate when there is no on-premises fallback.
Identity and access management should move toward the principle of least privilege as a default. That means mapping roles, groups, and permissions so that users and services have exactly the access they need and no more. You should also assess how multifactor authentication, single sign-on, and conditional access policies will function in the cloud environment, especially for contractors and partners.
4. Evaluate Performance, Reliability, and Vendor Risk
Cloud marketing often emphasizes elasticity and high availability, but those benefits do not appear automatically. Before you commit to cloud-only systems, you must test whether your applications will perform acceptably over realistic network conditions and whether your provider can meet your reliability targets.
Performance testing should account for latency-sensitive workflows, large file transfers, and peak-usage periods. Some applications that work well on a local network behave very differently when every transaction crosses the internet. You must know how you will handle provider outages, regional failures, and maintenance windows.
Vendor risk extends beyond uptime. You should assess contractual lock-in, data-extraction options, and the cost of exiting a platform if pricing or policy changes become unfavorable. A clear view of these factors before migration helps you avoid being trapped in a technically impressive but strategically fragile arrangement.
Turning the Audit into a Living Practice
A pre-migration audit is the first iteration of a continuous review process. Once systems move to cloud-only infrastructure, new services, datasets, and integrations will appear, each with its own risks and benefits.
If your team keeps inventories, data classifications, access models, and vendor assessments current, future changes become far less disruptive. The organization gains the ability to adjust cloud usage with intent rather than out of habit or urgency.
