Cloud migrations that land on budget — and stay there.
Cloud migrations fail in two predictable places: lift-and-shift without architecture refactoring leaves a legacy stack on rented hardware at higher cost, and FinOps treated as a Year-2 concern produces the bill that derails the program. PEXIVA's cloud migration methodology builds architecture and FinOps into the program from Day 1 — and trains the operations team before handoff, not after.
Methodology, not fabricated case studies.
PEXIVA publishes engagement methodology rather than client case studies with invented metrics. We do this for two reasons: most of our work is governed by NDAs that don't permit public reference, and we believe a real CIO or operating partner gets more value from interrogating the methodology we'd actually use than from reading sanitized success stories with implausibly clean numbers.
The framework below is what we'd run on your engagement. Phases, durations, deliverables, principles, anti-patterns. Defensible because every step is what we'd actually do — not retrofitted to a marketing narrative.
When organizations call us about cloud migration.
A mid-market or enterprise operator is moving workloads to AWS, Azure, or GCP. Symptoms include: a data center contract approaching renewal, an aging core platform vendor pushing cloud, application teams uncertain about modernization paths, an early FinOps shock from existing dev/test workloads, and a CFO who's heard the "cloud will save us money" pitch and is now skeptical. Sometimes a previous lift-and-shift partner has already produced disappointing results.
Common signals
Recognize any of these? They're the patterns that drive cloud migration engagements:
- Previous initiatives produced disappointing results
- Leadership is not aligned on what success looks like
- Vendor-led roadmap is being mistaken for architecture
- Compliance and security are afterthoughts in the plan
- No instrumented KPI tied to the work yet
Four outcome categories we measure against.
Every engagement scoped against these four. If we can't articulate the target in all four — we don't take the engagement.
Cloud spend within ±10% of forecast monthly — FinOps discipline embedded in every workload from cutover
Phased migration completed on budget and on schedule, with reservations and savings plans active before peak utilization
Workloads refactored where the economics support it — not lift-and-shift everywhere by default
Internal operations team trained, runbooks tested, on-call rotation operating before the consulting team disengages
Four phases. Real durations. Real deliverables.
This is the actual rhythm of a PEXIVA cloud migration engagement. Phase 1 typically funds Phase 2. Each phase ends with a decision gate — continue, adjust, or stop.
Workload Assessment · 2-3 weeks
Activities: Application portfolio analysis. Dependency mapping. 7-Rs analysis (rehost, replatform, refactor, repurchase, retire, retain, relocate) per workload. TCO modeling. Cloud target selection (AWS, Azure, GCP, multi-cloud).
Deliverables: Application portfolio matrix. 7-Rs disposition map. TCO model with per-workload economics. Migration wave plan.
Landing Zone & FinOps · 4-6 weeks
Activities: Cloud landing zone design (AWS Control Tower, Azure Landing Zones, GCP Org Policy). Network architecture. Security baseline. FinOps tooling and tagging strategy. Reservation and savings plan strategy.
Deliverables: Landing zone (deployed). Tagging policy (enforced). FinOps dashboard. Reserved/savings plan recommendation.
Phased Migration · 12-26 weeks
Activities: Wave-by-wave migration following the disposition plan. Refactoring where the economics justify it. Cutover planning per workload. Performance validation. FinOps continuous review.
Deliverables: Workloads migrated per wave. Cutover runbooks. Performance validation reports. Updated cost forecasts.
Optimize & Operate · Ongoing
Activities: Continuous rightsizing. Reserved capacity refresh. Anomaly detection. Operations team training and certification. Knowledge transfer. Optional managed services handoff.
Deliverables: Optimization report. Trained ops team. Operations runbooks. Managed services SLA (if engaged).
Five non-negotiables across every phase.
- FinOps embedded from Day 1 — tagging, reservations, anomaly detection — not Year 2
- Refactoring decisions made on per-workload economics, not blanket policy
- Cutover planned for zero or minimal downtime where the workload allows
- Operations team trained and certified before the migration team disengages
- Architecture decision records (ADRs) capture every major choice and why
Anti-patterns we refuse
Patterns that produce the failures we've seen too often. We won't run an engagement structured this way, even if a client asks for it:
- Lift-and-shift everywhere by default, then "we'll modernize later" (which doesn't happen)
- FinOps treated as a tooling purchase, not an operating discipline
- No tagging strategy — chargeback impossible, anomalies invisible
- Operations team handed a runbook on Friday and on-call on Monday
Tell us about your cloud migration trigger event.
A 1-hour working session with our senior team. We'll walk you through the methodology applied to your specific situation. You leave with an architecture and decision memo whether we engage or not.
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