The readiness path

1. 1. Inventory with owners

   Name every candidate system, its data stores, and a human owner who can answer coupling questions. Unowned systems do not enter wave plans.

2. 2. Dependency and latency pass

   Trace batch jobs, shared directories, firewall rules, and chatty pairs. Capture latency budgets for paths that will cross environment boundaries.

3. 3. Placement decisions

   Decide remain, migrate, or hybrid for each workload with written rationale — not slogan-level cloud-first mandates.

4. 4. Wave charter and exit criteria

   Group systems into waves with go/no-go gates leadership can defend. Remediations that unblock early waves rise to the top of the backlog.

5. 5. Runbook and tabletop

   Write the night-of sequence, then rehearse it. Missing credentials and optimistic timing appear here, not during the window.

6. 6. Cutover with rollback honesty

   Execute only when exit criteria and rollback points are explicit. Pause is a valid outcome when measurements breach the published budget.

Start with the flagship assessment Contact details