11 November 2025 · Mei-Ling Chen
Wave zero: what to finish before the first cloud move
Most migration pain is invented in the weeks before wave one — missing inventories, unclear exit criteria, and optimistic assumptions about shared directories.
Teams often treat the first migration wave as a learning experiment. That only works if wave zero has already settled the basics: who owns each system, which data stores are shared, and what “done” means for a cutover.
In Taiwan manufacturing and logistics estates we routinely find shared file shares and overnight batch jobs that no architecture diagram mentions. Wave zero is the period where those facts are written down and assigned owners — before anyone books a maintenance window.
A practical wave-zero checklist includes a living inventory, a dependency pass for the first candidate group, exit criteria that leadership has signed, and a rehearsal date on the calendar. Skip any of those and wave one becomes archaeology under pressure.