Playbook
On-Prem to Cloud, Without the Weekend Outage
Moving an Indian business off its own servers: what to move first, what never to lift-and-shift, and how to cut over on a Tuesday afternoon instead of a Sunday night.
Most on-prem migrations in India stall for the same reason: someone plans a single weekend cutover, the rollback plan is “put it back”, and the business cannot accept the risk. Sequenced properly, none of that is necessary.
Move in this order
- Static assets and backups first. Zero risk, immediate benefit, and it proves the network path.
- Then the read-only workloads — reporting, exports, dashboards. If they break, nobody stops working.
- Then stateless services, running in parallel with the old ones.
- The database last, with replication running long before cutover.
What not to lift-and-shift
Copying a machine into a cloud VM gives you the same problems at higher cost. The two things worth changing during the move: file storage that assumes a local disk, and anything that depends on a fixed IP or a server's local clock.
The database cutover
| Step | What it buys |
|---|---|
| Replicate on-prem → cloud for days | Real data, real volume, no pressure |
| Read traffic to the replica | Proves the path under load |
| Brief write freeze (minutes) | Consistency, not an outage |
| Promote and repoint | Cutover |
| Keep the old primary read-only for a week | A rollback that actually exists |
Costs to model before you move
- Egress. Data leaving the cloud is the line item that surprises Indian businesses most.
- Managed database versus self-hosted — cheaper to run, more expensive to rent.
- Reserved capacity for the steady load, on-demand only for spikes.
Related: modernising without downtime.
Questions
AWS, Azure or GCP?
Whichever your team can operate at 2am. For most Indian mid-market businesses the deciding factors are existing Microsoft licensing, local support and price — not features.
Will we need downtime?
A short write freeze during the database promotion, usually minutes. We have not needed a full outage window for a migration.
