Cloud migration isn’t just about trimming IT bills anymore - it’s the launchpad for today’s biggest innovations, from smarter apps to AI breakthroughs. In fact, McKinsey reports that more than 70% of organisations are already experimenting with generative AI in at least one business area. The catch? AI can only shine if it’s built on strong cloud foundations.
Most businesses know the cloud opens the door to scale, speed, and smarter use of data, but many still find themselves stuck trying to squeeze out full value while keeping risks in check. Think of the cloud as the stage where your AI models perform their best: plenty of compute power, data at their fingertips, and room to grow.
In this guide, we’ll walk you through how to craft a cloud migration strategy that keeps risks low and sets your AI ambitions free.
What is cloud migration and why does it matter?
Cloud migration involves moving workloads from on-premises data centres to public, private, or hybrid cloud platforms. The goal is to take advantage of the cloud’s scalability, flexibility, and managed services without having to own all the underlying hardware. However, this is more of a historical approach.
A few years ago, businesses predominantly moved to the cloud to take advantage of perceived cost benefits or move away from legacy infrastructure. Those ‘lift‑and‑shift’ migrations often failed to meet expectations and rarely unlocked the full cloud benefits because the underlying processes and architectures remained unchanged.
For example, many firms jumped to the cloud during the pandemic but didn’t modernise or adopt an evergreen approach to continuous optimisation. As a result, their environments stagnated, failed to follow best practices, and incurred unexpected costs.
Today, the motivation is broader: organisations want to harness cloud‑enabled AI, operate more sustainably and respond quickly to market changes. A new wave of cloud migrations focuses on rearchitecting and optimising for AI, data, and sustainability. Done right, this wave can help businesses innovate safely and responsibly.
Common challenges in cloud migration
Cloud migration projects often stumble over the same obstacles. Without reshaping business strategies around the cloud’s ever-evolving capabilities, environments often stagnate - drifting from best practices, falling behind on governance, and missing out on innovation. What should have been a catalyst for agility becomes just another static platform, leaving teams stuck with legacy processes in a modern setting.
This lack of continuous optimisation is also why cloud has developed a reputation as the more expensive option compared to on-prem.
Ross commented:
Migrating without rearchitecting, modernising, and embedding cost controls can lead to spiralling spend and poor performance. Instead of realising the promised efficiencies, many organisations see rising bills, dissatisfaction, and in some cases even revert back to on-prem infrastructure. The reality is that cloud success depends on treating migration as the start of an ongoing transformation - not a one-off project.
Key benefits of cloud migration
Despite the challenges, successful cloud migrations unlock numerous benefits that go beyond potential cost savings.
Data & AI benefits
Cloud platforms provide the scalable infrastructure and unified data pipelines essential for AI adoption. By consolidating data into cloud-native architectures, organisations can enable advanced analytics, real-time insights, and GenAI workloads that simply aren’t possible with fragmented on-prem systems. This gives teams the agility they need to experiment and innovate at speed.
Innovation & competitive advantage
Migrating to the cloud unlocks access to constantly evolving technologies, from serverless computing to AI solutions. Organisations that embrace these capabilities can rapidly prototype new digital products, outpace competitors, and respond faster to shifting market conditions.
Scalability & flexibility
Cloud environments allow businesses to dynamically scale resources up or down based on demand, eliminating the need to over-provision for peak usage. This flexibility is vital for handling unpredictable workloads, particularly data-intensive or AI-driven processes where demand can surge without warning.
Cost efficiencies & operational gains
While the cloud is not automatically cheaper, it can drive cost efficiencies when combined with modernisation and ongoing optimisation. Migrating from ageing infrastructure reduces capital expenditure while pay-as-you-go models encourage right-sizing. However, successful cloud migrations rely on input - i.e. you get out what you put in.
Enhanced security & compliance
Leading cloud providers offer built-in security frameworks, continuous patching, and industry-standard compliance certifications. When couple with strong governance, these capabilities can improve security postures beyond what is feasible on-prem, reducing the risk of breaches while supporting regulatory requirements.
Step-by-step guide to cloud migration
Understanding how to migrate to the cloud is key to getting your migration right. Selecting the appropriate approach to cloud migration depends on your organisation’s maturity, appetite for change, and risk tolerance.
Some choose a ‘big bang’ migration, moving most workloads at once. Others adopt a phased approach, migrating in waves to reduce risk and build confidence. Regardless of the cloud migration strategy you choose, the following steps provide a practical roadmap.
Assess & strategise
Every successful cloud migration begins with a clear understanding of the current state. At Nasstar, we start with a discovery and assessment phase to map out your existing infrastructure, applications, and dependencies. Then, through customer stakeholder workshops we enrich the data with critical context to the business's unique challenges, goals, previous progress, and strategic initiatives.
This isn’t solely about technology - it's about aligning migration goals with business outcomes, especially for data and AI enablement.
Key actions:
Workshops to understand business context, challenges, progress, and aspirations
Audit current workloads, infrastructure, and data flows
Identify application dependencies and business criticality
Define target outcomes (e.g. AI-readiness, cost optimisation, scalability)
Design the cloud architecture
Once the baseline and overall objectives are understood, a cloud architecture can be designed, supporting both immediate needs and long-term growth. This stage prioritises building a secure, well-governed foundation that can scale with AI and data-driven initiatives. Again, we want to ensure we align the cloud architecture with the value it can provide to the business.
Key actions:
Workshops to understand business context, challenges, progress and aspirations
Choose the right cloud model (public, private or hybrid)
Design architecture for resilience, security, and compliance
Build in automation for deployment, monitoring, and cost controls
All captured data - alongside the context, priorities, and challenges surfaced through customer workshops - is systematically mapped to business outcomes that matter most to the organisation. This ensures the migration strategy is not only technically sound but also aligned with key drivers such as maximising return on investment, reducing operational costs, addressing service delivery challenges, and ultimately enhancing the value delivered to end customers.
By anchoring the approach in what is most important to the business, the migration becomes a catalyst for measurable impact and strategic growth.
Choose the right migration approach
We mentioned earlier that organisations can choose either a phased or ‘big bang’ approach to cloud migration, and Nasstar can help you decide which method is best for your business. Many organisations benefit from a phased approach if there are no looming deadlines or other factors impeding this. Phased approaches typically start with non-critical workloads, allowing for learning and risk reduction.
Business value is also key here. We will work with you to understand what short and long-term goals your business has to help us determine the best migration approach. For example, we will sometimes prioritise workloads based on what will return value to the business in the quickest way, helping you realise ROI faster.
Key actions:
Prioritise workloads based on complexity and risk
Pilot low-risk applications first to validate tooling and processes
Develop a timeline that balances speed with operational safety
Business readiness
Every organisation is at a different stage in its cloud journey, and business readiness is a critical factor in determining success when it comes to execution. We can work with your businesses to understand its maturity and readiness to make a fundamental shift to a cloud-first approach.
This involves everything from planning communication and change management strategies, to preparing and training teams for new ways of working, through to providing hands-on support with our next-generation managed services. By helping your teams adapt and evolve, we ensure your business is positioned for long-term growth in the cloud.
Key actions:
Assess organisational maturity and readiness for a cloud-first model
Plan communication and messaging around new processes and ways of working
Provide support and augmentation with next-gen managed services
Guide teams along a wider maturity journey to build long-term resilience
Execute & modernise
Cloud migration isn’t just about shifting workloads; it’s a strategic opportunity to modernise your technology stack and internal processes in ways that directly drive business value. At Nasstar, we go beyond lift-and-shift by focusing on refactoring or replatforming where appropriate, enabling access to cloud-native capabilities that lay the foundation for AI, analytics, and automation.
Crucially, these modernisation efforts are mapped to outcomes that matter to your organisation, whether that’s improving ROI, reducing operational costs, overcoming service delivery challenges, or enhancing the value you provide to your customers. This ensures that every technical decision contributes meaningfully to your broader business goals.
Key actions:
Migrate workloads using automated tools, where possible
Refactor legacy apps to use cloud-native services
Implement robust security controls and identity governance
Optimise & continuously improve
Cloud migration is just the beginning - not the end. We understand that true cloud success lies in what comes after go-live. That’s why we emphasise the importance of establishing an evergreen operational model. One that keeps environments secure, cost-efficient, and continuously optimised.
Many organisations struggle to maintain this momentum, falling short of the continuous improvement loop that’s essential for unlocking long-term value and avoiding the cost overruns that often accompany poorly managed migrations.
Through next-gen managed services at Nasstar, we offer a proactive, customer-focused approach that bridges skills gaps, reduces operational burden, and enables internal teams to focus on high-value strategic initiatives rather than day-to-day management.
Key actions:
Implement FinOps practices and cost monitoring
Regularly review architecture against best practices
Continually adopt new cloud and AI services to drive innovation
Real-world cloud migration examples
At Nasstar, we’ve been helping customers migrate to the cloud for years. We have the experience and expertise needed to truly modernise your cloud migration, whether you’re just getting started or you’re already in the cloud.
Wiggin LLP
This law firm partnered with Nasstar to migrate its on‑premises infrastructure to Microsoft Azure. There was a short timeline to hit, so we used an agile approach, enabling secure remote work and improved collaboration. By migrating core applications and implementing cloud-first managed desktops, Wiggin reduced operational costs and gained the ability to adopt AI solutions that would improve efficiency and employee experience.
South Yorkshire Mayoral Combined Authority (SYMCA)
Nasstar designed and delivered a tactical, phased digital transformation for SYMCA’s public transport operations. We undertook extensive work to understand their business and the challenges they faced. This meant we could help develop and tailor their digital strategy and approach in line with their wider goals, unlocking value to better serve the people of South Yorkshire.
By moving to the cloud in stages, migrating data, and implementing analytics dashboards, SYMCA gained real‑time insights into passenger demand and improved service delivery.
Cloud migration best practices
A well-planned cloud migration strategy is only half the battle. Long-term success depends on how you execute it and the reasons behind why you are migrating. Following proven best practices helps reduce risk, control costs, and set your cloud environment up for continuous innovation.
These guidelines, drawn from Nasstar’s experience managing complex migrations and industry standards, will help ensure your move to the cloud delivers lasting value.
Use automation tools for efficiency: Automate deployments, configuration, and testing to reduce human error and accelerate timelines.
Prioritise security from the start: Build security, identity governance, and compliance controls into your design, not as an afterthought.
Understand the business challenges, goals, and impact: Really take the time to understand why you are migrating and what the bigger impact will be - this will help to choose the right approach.
Involve stakeholders across the business: Engage both IT and business leaders to align migration goals with strategic objectives.
Start small with pilot projects: Begin with low-risk workloads to validate your approach before scaling up.
Align with industry standards: Use established frameworks like Microsoft’s Cloud Adoption Framework (CAF) to ensure your migration approach follows best practice and is built for sustainability and continuous improvement.
Invest in upskilling: Provide training in cloud platforms, DevSecOps, data engineering and AI, or lean on a managed service provider like Nasstar to handle the complexities of cloud migration.
Cultivate an evergreen mindset: Cloud environments are continuously evolving so be sure to regularly review architectures, retire unused services, and modernise applications.
Cloud migration checklist
Below is a high‑level checklist you can use to tick off as you journey through your cloud migration process. You can use it as a blueprint that can be tailored to your organisation’s needs and regulations.
Pre-migration
This is where you need to define key objectives and KPIs.
Understand business goals, challenges, and migration value
Create application and data inventory
Identify dependencies and technical debt
Classify data and compliance requirements
Engage stakeholders and build governance structure
Develop business case and budget
Select cloud providers and determine target architecture
During migration
Through your migration, your key action is to establish pilot projects and get to work on moving your workloads.
Configure landing zones (network, IAM, security policies)
Test migration tools and performance
Migrate workloads in waves with rollback plans
Monitor performance, security, and cost
Validate data integrity and application functionality
Communicate progress to stakeholders
Post-migration
Cloud migration isn’t a ‘one-and-done' task, it should be a continuous optimisation process.
Right‑size resources and implement auto‑scaling
Set up cost dashboards and FinOps practices
Review security posture and remediate misconfigurations
Train teams on new tools and processes
Decommission on-prem assets
Plan for further refactoring and AI adoption
Establish continuous improvement cycles
Already in the cloud?
Many organisations have already moved significant workloads to the cloud, but we’re seeing many of them still not realising the full benefits. From spiralling costs and outdated architectures to security gaps and difficulty leveraging AI, we’ve seen it all. If this sounds familiar to you, it doesn’t mean you need to start from scratch.
At Nasstar, we can help you at any stage of the cloud migration journey, helping you optimise and modernise what you already have in place. Whether you’ve already moved to the cloud but want to optimise and prepare for AI-driven innovation, or your strategy is no longer aligned to the business goals, here are some of the cloud migration tasks we can help you with:
Conduct a cloud health check: Review your deployment against the cloud provider’s best practices and identify technical debt. Tools like Azure Advisor can help highlight cost, performance, and security issues. During Nasstar workshops, we also work to understand your business, challenges, goals, and strategy to align your cloud approach to these factors and maximise value.
Implement FinOps: Tag resources, analyse spending patterns, and adopt rightsizing strategies. Transparent cost allocation encourages accountability across departments.
Refactor workloads gradually: Move from lift‑and‑shift to replatforming or refactoring, adopting serverless and managed services to reduce operational overhead and unlock elasticity.
Modernise your data estate: Consolidate data siloes into a unified lake or lakehouse and implement governance to make data discoverable and accessible for analytics and AI.
Adopt AI and machine learning thoughtfully: Start with targeted use cases aligned to business value, demand forecasting, or fraud detection.
H2: How Nasstar helps with cloud migration
Cloud migration is no longer optional; it’s the launch pad for data‑driven innovation and generative AI. Yet migrating successfully requires more than flipping a switch. It demands careful planning, stakeholder alignment, governance, security, cost management, and a commitment to continuous improvement.
The team at Nasstar has deep expertise across Microsoft Azure and other cloud hyperscalers, enabling us to provide an end-to-end cloud migration service. We can help you with everything from discovery and planning to design, execution, and optimisation.
By following the step‑by‑step roadmap outlined here and partnering with an experienced provider like Nasstar, you can unlock the cloud’s full potential and build an AI‑ready foundation for the future.
