Cloud Migration

Migrating your infrastructure and applications to the cloud is one of the most impactful technology decisions a business can make. Done right, cloud migration unlocks elastic scalability, reduced capital expenditure, improved disaster recovery, and access to advanced services like managed AI and serverless compute. Done poorly, it can introduce downtime, security gaps, and cost overruns. At SoniNow, we follow a structured, phased approach to cloud migration — assessment, planning, migration, and optimisation — ensuring your move to AWS, Azure, GCP, or DigitalOcean is smooth, secure, and delivers measurable business value from day one.

Assessment

Every successful cloud migration begins with a thorough understanding of your current environment. Without a clear picture of your workloads, dependencies, and performance baselines, you cannot build a reliable migration plan.

Discovery and Inventory

We conduct a comprehensive discovery of your on-premises or hosted infrastructure. Using agent-based and agentless discovery tools — such as AWS Migration Hub Discovery, Azure Migrate, or open-source alternatives — we inventory every server, virtual machine, database, storage volume, and network device. This inventory captures operating system versions, installed applications, resource utilisation (CPU, memory, disk IOPS), and inter-service dependencies.

Dependency Mapping

Modern applications rarely run in isolation. A web server depends on an application server, which depends on a database, which may depend on a caching layer and a search index. We create dependency maps that reveal these relationships, identifying critical paths that must migrate together to avoid breaking connectivity. This mapping step is especially important for "lift and shift" migrations, where IP addresses or hostnames may change in the target environment.

Total Cost of Ownership Analysis

We compare your current infrastructure costs (hardware, software licences, power, cooling, facilities, and staff) against projected cloud costs using each provider's pricing calculator (AWS TCO Calculator, Azure TCO, GCP Pricing Calculator). This analysis factors in reserved instances or savings plans, data egress costs, and managed service premiums. The result is a transparent, apples-to-apples comparison that informs the migration business case.

Migration Strategy

Based on the assessment findings, we recommend the optimal migration strategy for each workload. The industry consensus identifies seven common migration patterns, collectively known as the "7 Rs."

Rehost (Lift and Shift)

Rehosting involves moving workloads to the cloud with minimal changes — typically spinning up equivalent VM instances and restoring application data. This is the fastest path to cloud adoption and is ideal for legacy applications that are not easily containerised. We use tools like AWS VM Import/Export, Azure Site Recovery, or CloudEndure to replicate on-premises VMs to the cloud with minimal downtime.

Replatform (Lift, Tinker, and Shift)

Replatforming introduces targeted optimisations without rearchitecting the entire application. For example, migrating an on-premises MySQL database to a managed service like Amazon RDS or Cloud SQL, or swapping a self-managed web server for a load-balanced, auto-scaled group. These changes reduce operational overhead while preserving the core application logic.

Refactor / Rearchitect

For applications that need to fully leverage cloud-native benefits — such as auto-scaling, serverless, or managed container orchestration — we refactor the application architecture. This may involve decomposing a monolith into microservices, adopting event-driven patterns with message queues, or moving to a serverless stack with AWS Lambda, Cloud Functions, or Azure Functions.

Retire and Retain

Not every workload belongs in the cloud. We identify applications that can be decommissioned (reducing migration scope and cost) and workloads that must remain on-premises due to regulatory or latency requirements (hybrid or edge strategy).

Data Transfer

Moving data from on-premises to the cloud requires careful planning to minimise downtime, ensure data integrity, and protect against interception.

Online Transfer

For datasets up to several terabytes with available bandwidth, we use online transfer methods. AWS DataSync, Azure Data Box Edge, and Google Transfer Service orchestrate encrypted, incremental transfers. Where possible, we perform an initial full baseline sync during a maintenance window, followed by incremental delta syncs so the final cutover is measured in minutes rather than days.

Offline Transfer

For multi-terabyte or petabyte-scale datasets — or for environments with limited internet bandwidth — offline data transfer is often faster and more cost-effective. AWS Snowball Edge, Azure Data Box, and Google Transfer Appliance provide ruggedised storage devices that are shipped to your site, loaded with data, and returned for ingestion into the cloud.

Database Migration

Database migrations require special attention to schema compatibility, character encoding, and transaction consistency. We use AWS Database Migration Service (DMS), Azure Database Migration Service, or Google Database Migration Service to perform live migrations with minimal downtime. These tools handle continuous replication from the source database to the target, allowing a final cutover within seconds.

Post-Migration Optimisation

Reaching the cloud is not the finish line — it is the starting point for continuous improvement.

Performance Optimisation

We analyse application performance in the new environment, adjusting instance sizes, enabling caching (CloudFront, Cloud CDN, or Redis), and fine-tuning database parameters. CloudWatch, Azure Monitor, or Cloud Monitoring dashboards track key metrics, and we configure alerts for any regression.

Security Hardening

Post-migration, we audit every resource for security best practices — ensuring S3 buckets and Storage accounts are not publicly accessible, IAM roles follow least privilege, encryption is enabled at rest and in transit, and VPC security groups restrict unnecessary inbound access. Security Hub, Defender for Cloud, or Security Command Center provide ongoing compliance scoring.

Cost Governance

We implement budgets, cost alerts, and tagging strategies to track spending by environment, project, or department. Right-sizing recommendations from the cloud provider's cost management tools are reviewed monthly, and Savings Plans or Reserved Instances are adjusted for steady-state workloads.

Operational Readiness

Finally, we establish runbooks for common operational tasks (deployments, backups, scaling events, incident response) and train your team on cloud console navigation, monitoring dashboards, and self-service provisioning. Post-migration support from SoniNow ensures a smooth transition period while your team gains cloud confidence.

Whether you are moving your first server or orchestrating a multi-workload migration at enterprise scale, SoniNow provides the methodology, tools, and expertise to make cloud migration a success.