Lifting and shifting legacy core applications demands extreme precision to prevent outages. Our Senior Cloud Architects stage complete identical environments, establishing secure VPN site-to-site bridges. Once data replication is identically synchronized, we execute the final cutover invisibly over a weekend.
Pre-Migration Assessment and Staging
Before moving a single byte, we inventory your on-premise workloads using AWS Application Discovery Service or Azure Migrate, categorising servers by complexity and dependency. We then build an identical staging environment in the target cloud region — Azure UAE Central or AWS Middle East — and validate application behaviour against real traffic replays before any DNS change is made.
This discovery phase typically takes 1–2 weeks for environments with up to 30 servers, and produces a dependency map that prevents "surprise" outages caused by undocumented inter-server connections — a very common issue in UAE businesses that have grown organically without formal change management.
- Full workload discovery and dependency mapping
- Cloud-native staging environment validated before cutover
- Site-to-site VPN bridge between on-premise and cloud during replication
- Application compatibility testing under realistic load
Data Replication and Cutover Execution
We use AWS Elastic Disaster Recovery or Azure Site Recovery to continuously replicate your on-premise VMs to the cloud staging environment. Replication runs silently in the background for days or weeks — your staff never notice. Once the replication lag drops below 30 seconds, we schedule a maintenance window (typically a Thursday night after MENA market close) to execute the final cutover.
DNS records are updated with a 60-second TTL, and we keep the on-premise environment in standby for 72 hours in case an unexpected issue requires rollback. For most migrations we complete the entire process with under 2 hours of scheduled downtime.
- Continuous VM replication with sub-30-second lag before cutover
- DNS cutover executed during off-peak hours
- On-premise standby retained for 72-hour rollback window
- Post-migration performance validation against pre-migration baselines
Post-Migration Optimisation
After migration, cloud resources are rarely right-sized on day one. We monitor resource utilisation for the first 30 days and make instance type adjustments based on actual usage patterns. We also convert remaining On-Demand instances to Reserved Instances once workload patterns are confirmed, and implement auto-scaling groups for web tiers to handle peak traffic without manual intervention.