Cloud migration — the process of moving your applications, data, and infrastructure from on-premises servers to a cloud provider — is one of the most impactful technology decisions a business can make. Done well, it reduces infrastructure costs, improves reliability, and unlocks capabilities that would be impossible or prohibitively expensive to build on-premises. Done poorly, it creates security risks, unexpected costs, and performance problems that are hard to diagnose and expensive to fix.
This guide walks through the process we follow when helping Philippine businesses migrate to AWS, Microsoft Azure, or Google Cloud Platform.
Phase 1: Discovery and Assessment
Before touching any infrastructure, we spend time understanding what you currently have. This includes inventorying all applications and their dependencies, documenting current infrastructure (servers, databases, networking), measuring current performance baselines, identifying compliance and data sovereignty requirements, and estimating current total infrastructure cost (hardware, power, cooling, maintenance, staffing).
This phase often surfaces surprises — undocumented systems, shadow IT, applications that haven't been updated in years. Discovering these before migration is far better than discovering them during it.
Phase 2: Migration Strategy
Not everything should be migrated the same way. We classify each workload using what the industry calls the "6 Rs":
- Rehost (Lift and Shift) — Move as-is to cloud VMs. Fast, low risk, minimal immediate benefit.
- Replatform — Make small optimizations during migration (e.g., move to managed database service). Medium effort, meaningful benefit.
- Refactor — Redesign the application to be cloud-native. High effort, high benefit.
- Repurchase — Replace with a SaaS solution. Often the right call for commodity functions.
- Retire — Decommission systems that are no longer needed. Reduces scope and cost.
- Retain — Keep on-premises for now. Valid for systems with regulatory restrictions or near end-of-life.
Phase 3: Architecture Design
Once we know what's moving and how, we design the target cloud architecture. This includes network design (VPCs, subnets, security groups), compute sizing and auto-scaling configuration, database selection and configuration, security architecture (IAM, encryption, secrets management), and disaster recovery and backup strategy.
Phase 4: Proof of Concept
Before migrating production workloads, we build and validate the target environment with a representative subset of your workloads. This lets us validate architecture decisions, measure actual performance, train your team on the new environment, and identify gaps before they affect live operations.
Phase 5: Migration Execution
We migrate workloads in waves — starting with the lowest-risk, lowest-complexity systems to build confidence and refine the process before tackling critical production systems. Each migration includes a detailed rollback plan in case something goes wrong.
Phase 6: Optimization and Cost Management
A common mistake is treating cloud migration as a one-time project. Cloud cost optimization is an ongoing practice. After migration, we review compute rightsizing, reserved instance purchasing, storage tiering, and idle resource identification. Most clients reduce their initial cloud bill by 25–40% within the first three months through these optimizations.
What Cloud Migration Costs in the Philippines
Migration costs vary widely based on the complexity and size of your environment. A small business migrating a handful of applications might spend ₱200,000–₱500,000 on migration services. A medium enterprise with 20–50 workloads might spend ₱1,000,000–₱3,000,000. Large enterprise migrations are scoped individually. These costs are typically recovered within 12–18 months through infrastructure cost savings.
