Ultimate On Premise to AWS Migration Checklist for 2025

Dinesh Thakur

29 May 2025

The migration of an IT infrastructure to the cloud might look like moving to a physical office. Still, instead of moving boxes with hardware and furniture, we move data, applications, and processes to the cloud. Migration of IT infrastructure is done to streamline processes, improve productivity, and operationally optimize businesses. Also, migration to the cloud enables companies to innovate, scale, and reduce costs. 

What is AWS Migration?

More and more organizations are shifting their IT infrastructure from on-premise data centers to the cloud. Amazon Web Services is a leading cloud service provider that offers many advantages over on-premise deployment. AWS migration is a combination of tasks, processes, and practices for migrating data and applications to the AWS cloud. 

If you are considering such a transition for your business, you need to understand the complete process thoroughly. This blog explains the step-by-step process for on-premise to AWS migration.

Why Do Organizations Migrate to Amazon Web Services?

Businesses migrate to Amazon Web Services, as AWS offers many advantages over other cloud services and on-premise deployments. Let us explore the top reasons or benefits for which businesses prefer migrating to AWS.

Price

Although AWS is well-known for its pay-per-use model, it also offers a wide range of options that let you use just the amount of service you need to keep expenses down.  For example, you can save cold data to an inexpensive storage provider like Amazon Glacier and use object storage tiering.

Agility

AWS allows organizations to iterate quickly by spinning up development, test, and production environments, integrating with DevOps workflows, and offering complete automation tools. Additionally, Amazon enables organizational units to establish their infrastructure and makes self-service IT simple.

Scalability 

In addition to offering limitless scalability, AWS offers numerous options for managing that scalability, including serverless services, containerized deployments, auto-scaling on EC2 instances, and more. Scalability and Agility are two primary reasons for which some businesses also prefer software migration which is a type of on-premise to cloud migration. 

Disaster Recovery and High Availability 

Even in the event of a disaster that impacts an entire Availability Zone, your services will continue to function because of Amazon's numerous data centers worldwide and Multi-AZ functionality, which allows you to run cloud services in various data centers.

On Premise to AWS Migration Checklist

A smooth migration requires careful planning and a sound step by step strategy. Follow the steps below for a smooth and successful migration from on-premise infrastructure to AWS.

Access and Planning

The first step in AWS migration is to conduct an assessment of your current IT environment, which includes identifying your current applications, data and workload you want to migrate. 

Create an inventory of all your applications and group them based on their purpose, complexity and importance. Also, it is essential to access their performance, security and stability. Understand the dependencies between systems and applications. You can use AWS pricing calculators, to get an estimate of the cost associated with running your workloads on AWS. To ensure alignment, engage stakeholders from various departments in your company to gather insights. 

Choose Right Strategy

AWS offers several migration strategies, known as the "6 R's": 

1. Rehost (Lift and Shift)
2. Replatform (Lift, Tinker, and Shift)
3. Repurchase (moving to a cloud-based version of software)
4. Refactor/Re-architect (reimagining the application for cloud-native features)
5. Retire (decommissioning unnecessary applications)
6. Retain (keeping some applications on-premise)

The right strategy depends on the complexity of the workload. Rehosting is ideal for simple workloads, while refactoring is best for complex or mission-critical applications to fully leverage AWS's capabilities.

Set Up Your AWS Environment

Get started by setting up an AWS account and the AWS Identity and Access Management (IAM) settings. This way, users, groups, and roles with the required permissions can be created. Following this, start designing the networking aspect of the infrastructure by configuring Amazon Virtual Private Cloud (VPC), subnets, and security groups to control the traffic. 

Choose the right storage services offered by AWS, including Amazon S3, EBS, or FSx for your data needs. Implement AWS Landing Zones or Control Tower for a well-architected, secure multi-account environment, and implement tagging for organizing resources and cost monitoring.

Migrate Your Data 

The process of migration to AWS is laid out with so many critical steps that facilitate an easy and effective migration route. First is the data migration, where AWS provides several tools for carrying out these tasks, such as AWS Database Migration Service (DMS) for most database migrations, AWS Snowball for big chunk transfers for a maximum of 50 TB, and AWS DataSync for automated data movement between on-premise storage and AWS. Furthermore, it is best to run a pilot migration, use secure methods of transfer, and encrypt any sensitive data throughout the migration process.

Migrate Applications and Workloads

The next thing is to migrate the applications and workloads. AWS services like AWS Server Migration Service (SMS) and AWS Application Migration Service can move servers and applications with little disruption. Containerization of applications using AWS Fargate or Amazon EKS could also be done from an operational perspective for better scalability and management. Testing applications in the AWS environment comes next, followed by adjusting resources to optimize performance.

Validate and Optimize

Post-migration would involve the validation and optimization phase to make sure everything is working properly, including application testing, performance monitoring through AWS CloudWatch, conducting security audits to ensure compliance, and using auto-scaling and AWS Trusted Advisor for cost optimization. These best practices can be employed to actually maximize performance while reducing costs.

Ongoing Management and Optimization

Ongoing management and optimization have to be maintained if improvements are required in the AWS environment. You can regulate the costs using AWS Cost Explorer and Budgets, whereas AWS Security Hub allows for regular security reviews. 

The AWS Well-Architected Framework is put to use to further improve by reviewing and refining the architecture on an ongoing basis. Overall, moving to AWS can be arduous and complex, yet if done with painstaking efforts, it offers benefits in regard to cost and agility that can be enjoyed over time.

Benefits of On-Premise to AWS Migration

Businesses choose to move their workloads and applications from on-premises data centers to cloud infrastructure for a variety of reasons. There are instances when it stems from a broad desire to utilize the cloud's essentially infinite storage.  There are additional situations where companies want to address certain requirements, such as providing DevOps with better, more adaptable working conditions. 

Many of the benefits of On-premise to AWS migration are similar to the ones in desktop to web application migration services, like improved accessibility and performance. However, the vast majority of enterprises hope to get the following primary benefits from their cloud migration:

Increased Accessibility

Cloud migration offers an array of benefits to a business and has become very enticing to most organizations. Perhaps one of the main advantages is accessibility. Since team members are often scattered across different locations and are working from home, cloud infrastructure ensures these employees do not face any roadblocks in accessing important apps or data. They can connect from any part of the world from any device, at any given point in time.

Improved Performance and Agility

Another big plus of moving to the cloud is that it assures low latency, improved performance and agility. Migrating to the cloud reduces the risk of applications performing sluggishly or undergoing faulty interruptions through global data centers from huge cloud service providers. 

This minimizes latency and makes businesses run without any hurdles while needing to scale up and down quickly as per demand. By migrating their workloads to the cloud, organizations can add resources with ease to customize their new tools or upscale modification with existing custom-built apps in response to growing demand. 

Elasticity and Scalability

Cloud computing, on the contrary, fosters elasticity and scalability where companies need to expand or shrink on an ad hoc basis to meet abrupt surge demands. Whether it's a resounding quick hit to resources needs or another forcible adjunct in the long term, cloud infrastructures interpose to dynamically equate compute, storage, and memory capacities, an option outrightly refused to on-prem venues. 

Cost Efficiency

When considered for cost efficiency, cloud services help businesses save by only asking customers to pay for what they actually use. Scaling up on-premise infrastructure could cost you much in expansion and in reduction of capacity. The pay-as-you-go cloud model therefore provides businesses with better budgeting capabilities in the long run.

Security and Compliance

Lastly, security and compliance get to be enhanced in the cloud. Big cloud providers like AWS, Azure, and Google Cloud provide strong cloud-native security features that could somehow surpass the implementation of security possible on-premise. Such features allow a business to satisfy stringent compliance requirements and can be tuned in a multi-cloud environment for specific workloads that demand enhanced security.

Why Choose DITS for On Premise to AWS Migration?

For a successful on premise to AWS migration, there are many things that need to be considered. A precise assessment of your current IT infrastructure, choosing the right strategy and setting up the AWS environment are multiple things, and even one mistake can make the migration unsuccessful. 

At Ditstek Innovations, we take care of every step in migration, whether its assessment of current infrastructure, migrating data and applications or ongoing maintenance. Our team has years of experience in migrating one premise data, processes and applications to the cloud. 

In addition, if you prefer

The story doesn't end here, we take care of the ongoing management and optimization, if required to ensure everything works at its full potential and your staff can access the data, applications and other things when required within the AWS. 

Ready to migrate your on premise infrastructure to AWS? Contact us now to know more about our on premise to AWS migration services. 

Conclusion

Migration from on-premises infrastructure to AWS cloud is a strategic decision with many advantages, including accessibility, better performance, and better scalability. AWS constitutes a great option for businesses looking for flexible and cost-effective resources to optimize the IT environment. The migration process, although complicated, can be simplified with a data migration plan for legacy apps. Having a checklist helps to assess existing systems, engage in strategy selection, and use AWS tools for data migration and application optimization. It adds that the cloud also improves security, disaster recovery, and compliance for contemporary enterprises. Proper execution of the migration will empower organizations to enhance innovation and achieve long-term success by fully exploiting the enormous potential of the cloud through continuous operation.

FAQ’s

Why should I consider migrating from on-premise infrastructure to AWS in 2025?

You need to define your migration goals and objectives. Also, conduct an assessment of your current infrastructure, including inventory, dependencies, security, compliance, and cost analysis. In addition, consider the data integrity and a disaster recovery plan for migration. Cost efficiency and backup strategies are also vital in migration to a cloud platform.

What are the main stages in an on premise to AWS migration checklist?

The stages involved in migration to AWS include access and planning, choosing the right strategy, setting up the AWS environment, migrating data, migrating applications, workloads, validating and optimizing everything and ongoing management. All these stages are to be conducted in detail for a successful migration of applications, processes and resources.

How long does an on-premise to AWS migration usually take?

The time required for on-premise to AWS migration varies according to the size and complexity of data, the migration approach you use and the available resources. For small projects, migration can take a few days, while it can range from a few months to years for large enterprises as they have a huge infrastructure.

What are common challenges during migration, and how can I overcome them?

The common challenges while migration from on-premise to cloud include compatibility issues with new systems, possibility of data loss, data security, downtime, business disruption, inadequate cloud storage, integration with existing systems, legacy systems, outdated, or unnecessary data transfer, and inaccurate timeline estimates. A pre-assessment of your current infrastructure and planning the migration in advance can help overcome challenges for a smooth migration process.