Most cloud migrations we're asked to rescue didn't fail because of the technology. They failed because the team moved a system to the cloud before understanding what that system actually cost to run — in dollars, in on-call hours, and in the workarounds nobody had documented.
Before we recommend a migration, we run a short assessment with three parts: current cost mapping, dependency tracing, and failure-mode review. Skipping any one of them tends to show up later as a surprise invoice or an outage nobody can diagnose.
It's tempting to jump straight into choosing a cloud provider and a target architecture. But without a clear baseline of what the current system costs — including the hidden costs of manual intervention — there's no way to know whether a migration actually saves money, or just moves the spending somewhere less visible.
Legacy systems accumulate quiet dependencies: a scheduled script that emails a report, a integration that only runs during month-end close. These rarely appear in official documentation. We interview the people who operate the system day to day, not just the people who designed it.
The engineers who get woken up at 2am know exactly where a system is fragile. Their input shapes the migration plan more than any architecture review, because it tells us which parts of the system need redesigning — not just relocating.
None of this makes a migration faster. It makes the plan realistic — which, for most of the clients who come to us after a failed first attempt, turns out to matter more.