Cloud Migration Playbook: Choosing Between AWS, GCP and Azure

Moving to the cloud is no longer a question of whether, but of how and where. Yet many businesses still approach cloud migration as a simple “lift and shift” of servers, only to find their monthly bill higher than expected, their applications no faster and their team unsure who is responsible for security. A successful migration needs a clear strategy, the right platform and disciplined execution.

The Creensight team designs, migrates and operates workloads on Amazon Web Services (AWS), Google Cloud Platform (GCP), Microsoft Azure and DigitalOcean. This playbook explains how to assess your current environment, choose between the major providers, pick the right migration strategy for each application, control costs and run the migration with minimal disruption.

Why businesses migrate to the cloud

The motivations vary, but most migration projects we see are driven by a combination of the following:

• Ageing hardware. On-premise servers reaching end of life, with the choice of a large capital refresh or a move to the cloud.
• Scalability. Seasonal peaks — festive-season sales, admissions, financial year-end — that are expensive to provision for permanently.
• Reliability and disaster recovery. Multi-zone architectures and automated backups that are hard to replicate in a single office server room.
• Speed of delivery. Managed databases, containers and CI/CD pipelines that let developers ship faster.
• Access to modern services. Analytics, machine learning and AI services available on demand.
• Remote and distributed teams. Secure access from anywhere without complex VPN setups to a single office.

Phase 1: Assess and plan

Build an application inventory

List every application, database, file share, scheduled job and integration. For each, record the owner, business criticality, technology stack, data volume, current hosting, peak usage, licensing constraints and dependencies on other systems. This inventory is the foundation of every later decision.

Map dependencies

Applications rarely live alone. An ERP may depend on a shared database, a file server and a nightly export to the accounting system. Moving one without the others can break business processes or introduce latency. Group tightly coupled systems into “move groups” that migrate together.

Define success criteria

Agree measurable goals: target availability, recovery time and recovery point objectives, performance benchmarks, a monthly budget ceiling and compliance requirements. These criteria guide platform choice and architecture.

Choosing between AWS, GCP and Azure

All three hyperscale providers are mature, secure and globally available, with data-centre regions in India (including Mumbai, and additional regions such as Hyderabad, Delhi or Pune depending on provider). The differences are in ecosystem fit, service design and pricing details rather than raw capability.

Where DigitalOcean fits

For startups and smaller applications — a web application, an API and a managed database — DigitalOcean offers simpler pricing and a gentler learning curve. Many businesses start there and move specific workloads to a hyperscaler when they need more advanced services.

Our advice: choose the platform that best matches your team’s existing skills and your most important workloads, then standardise on it. Running across several clouds “to avoid lock-in” usually multiplies complexity long before it delivers any benefit for a small or mid-sized business.

Phase 2: Pick a migration strategy for each application

The widely used “6 Rs” framework helps you decide how to move each application.

It is common to find that 10–20% of applications in an inventory can simply be retired, which immediately reduces migration effort and cost.

Phase 3: Build the landing zone

Before moving any production workload, set up a secure, well-organised foundation — often called a landing zone.

• Account and project structure: separate production, staging and development environments.
• Identity and access: single sign-on, multi-factor authentication, least-privilege roles, no shared root credentials.
• Networking: private subnets, controlled internet access, VPN or private connectivity to offices if needed.
• Security baseline: encryption at rest and in transit, logging of all administrative actions, security alerts.
• Backups and disaster recovery: automated, tested backups with retention policies that meet your recovery objectives.
• Infrastructure as code: define everything with Terraform or equivalent tools so environments are reproducible and auditable.
• Cost controls: budgets, alerts and tagging so every resource has an owner and cost centre.

Phase 4: Migrate in waves

1. Pilot wave. Move one or two low-risk applications — an internal tool or a staging environment. Use this wave to test tooling, runbooks and monitoring.
2. Data migration planning. For databases, choose between offline transfer during a maintenance window and continuous replication with a short cut-over. Large datasets may need physical transfer appliances or staged syncs.
3. Testing. Run functional, performance and failover tests in the cloud environment before cut-over.
4. Cut-over. Freeze changes, perform final data sync, switch DNS or connections, and verify with business users.
5. Hypercare. Monitor closely for one to two weeks, with the old environment available for rollback.
6. Decommission. Once stable, shut down old servers and cancel associated licences and contracts.

Phase 5: Optimise costs and operations

Cloud costs are not fixed; they reflect your architecture and habits. After migration, schedule regular optimisation reviews.

• Right-size instances based on actual CPU and memory usage rather than on-premise specifications.
• Turn off non-production environments outside working hours.
• Use commitments such as reserved instances, savings plans or committed-use discounts for steady workloads.
• Choose storage tiers wisely, moving old backups and logs to cheaper archive storage.
• Adopt managed services where they reduce operational effort more than they add cost.
• Review data transfer charges, which are often overlooked in initial estimates.

These ranges are indicative and exclude ongoing cloud consumption, which depends on usage. Our cloud solutions and DevOps team prepares a detailed estimate of both migration effort and expected monthly costs.

Common cloud migration mistakes

• Lifting and shifting everything. You inherit all the inefficiencies of the old setup and often pay more.
• Skipping the dependency map. Hidden integrations break after cut-over.
• No cost governance. Untagged, forgotten resources accumulate month after month.
• Treating security as the provider’s job. Under the shared responsibility model, the provider secures the infrastructure; you secure your configuration, identities and data.
• Not training the team. Operations staff need new skills for cloud monitoring, automation and incident response.

Modernise while you migrate

Migration is an excellent moment to modernise selectively: containerise applications, introduce CI/CD pipelines, replace self-managed databases with managed ones and add proper monitoring. If an application needs significant rework anyway, our custom software development team can refactor it into a cloud-native design as part of the move.

Building the team and skills for cloud operations

Technology is only half of a successful migration; the other half is people. Cloud environments are operated differently from on-premise servers. Instead of logging in to individual machines to make changes, teams define infrastructure as code, deploy through automated pipelines, watch dashboards and alerts, and treat servers as replaceable rather than precious. This shift requires new skills and new habits.

For most small and mid-sized businesses, a practical model is to keep a small internal owner who understands the business systems and makes decisions, supported by a partner who provides cloud architecture, DevOps engineering and on-call support. Document runbooks for routine tasks — scaling, restoring a backup, rotating credentials, responding to an alert — so knowledge does not live in one person’s head.

• Train internal staff on the cloud console, billing dashboards and basic monitoring.
• Agree clear responsibilities for patching, backups, security alerts and cost reviews.
• Hold a monthly operations review covering incidents, performance and spend.
• Plan certifications or structured learning for team members who will own the platform long term.

Frequently asked questions

Will moving to the cloud reduce our IT costs?

It can, but not automatically. Savings come from right-sizing, turning off idle resources, using managed services and avoiding hardware refreshes. A poorly planned lift and shift can cost more than on-premise hosting.

Is our data safe in an Indian cloud region?

All major providers offer Indian regions with strong physical and infrastructure security. Your responsibility is configuring access, encryption, backups and monitoring correctly.

How much downtime should we expect during migration?

With careful planning and data replication, many applications can be cut over within a short maintenance window, often outside business hours. Legacy systems may need longer windows.

Can we move back if the cloud does not work for us?

Yes, if you design for portability — infrastructure as code, containers and standard databases make it easier to move between providers or back on-premise.

Plan your migration with Creensight

A well-planned cloud migration improves reliability, scalability and speed of delivery while keeping costs under control. The key is to assess first, choose the right strategy for each application, build a secure foundation and migrate in measured waves.

Contact the Creensight team for a cloud readiness assessment. We will review your current environment, recommend the right platform and strategy, and give you a clear plan and estimate for the migration.