A 2025 study of 2,000 UK small and medium enterprises (SMEs) by Ipsos for the Department for Business and Trade found that nearly a quarter (24%) had adopted digital technologies but weren’t fully utilising them. Globally, Flexera’s 2026 State of the Cloud Report puts wasted cloud spend at 29%, with budgets routinely overrunning by 17%. Across both, the same root cause keeps surfacing: businesses moving to new technology before they’re properly ready for it.
Cloud migration is one of the clearest examples. Projects that stall, overrun, or underdeliver after go-live can almost always be traced to one of five things skipped at the start. As an IT provider in Manchester running cloud migration projects end-to-end for SMEs, Cloud Geeni works through this checklist before any data moves.
1. Audit your current environment
You can’t migrate what you can’t see. It’s surprisingly easy to underestimate the sprawl of your own IT estate, and the gap between what the IT team thinks is running and what’s actually in use tends to widen the longer a business has operated.
A proper pre-migration audit should cover:
- Hardware inventory, including age and warranty status
- All software in use, including SaaS subscriptions paid for outside IT
- Application dependencies (which systems talk to which)
- User access, permissions, and dormant accounts
- Network bandwidth and current performance baseline
The cost of skipping this is felt mid-migration, when a critical dependency surfaces that wasn’t on the map. That’s where timelines slip and contingency budgets evaporate. An experienced IT company in Manchester will spend longer here than feels comfortable, on purpose.
2. Define your data residency requirements
Where your data sits legally matters before you choose a destination. The UK GDPR sets the baseline, but sector-specific rules in financial services, legal, and healthcare often go further, and many client contracts now include their own data location clauses. All of this constrains which cloud regions you can use, sometimes more than you’d expect.
This deserves its own conversation, and the NCSC has solid guidance on cloud security principles worth working through. The key point at this stage: get it documented before the design phase begins.
3. Assess application compatibility
Not every application is built for the cloud. Legacy line-of-business software, custom internal tools, and anything tied to specific hardware or older operating systems need a decision made before migration begins.
Three broad routes exist for each application in scope:
- Lift and shift: move the application as-is. Fastest, but rarely the right call for systems that weren’t designed for the cloud.
- Re-platform: minor changes so the application runs cleanly in the cloud. A middle path for software that mostly works.
- Refactor or replace: rebuild or swap out applications that aren’t cloud-fit. Usually the answer for heavily customised legacy systems.
Flexera’s 2026 report shows lift-and-shift still accounts for over a third of migration activity, often because it’s the path of least resistance, and it’s where most post-migration performance issues originate. Most internal teams haven’t run this type of assessment before, which is where experienced IT consulting in Manchester makes the difference.
4. Plan your backup and recovery position
Migration is the single moment of highest risk for your data, and one of the most dangerous assumptions to carry in is that the cloud handles backups automatically. Most cloud platforms protect their own infrastructure. The responsibility for backing up your data still sits with you.
Four things to settle before any data moves:
- Where current backups live and whether they’ve actually been tested in the last quarter
- Rollback options if the migration fails partway through
- RTO and RPO targets the business can genuinely live with
- The backup strategy for the new cloud environment, which has to be designed in from the start
Get this wrong, and a routine migration becomes a recovery exercise.
5. Assign internal ownership
Migrations treated solely as “IT’s project” stall the fastest. The successful ones have three roles assigned before any work starts:
- Executive sponsor – to own the budget and remove blockers
- Project owner – to run day-to-day decisions
- Comms lead – to keep the business informed and manage change resistance
Flexera’s 2025 State of the Cloud Report found that 75% of respondents named governance and a lack of internal resources or expertise among their top cloud challenges. Internal ownership is what turns those gaps into a workable plan. The right IT services provider in Manchester gives those roles the technical backup they need.
Get Your Cloud Migration Right First Time
Five things to get right is a lot to carry alongside running the business. Our Discover – Design – Deploy – Optimise process is built around exactly this checklist:
- Discover – maps the current estate, residency requirements, compatibility, and ownership
- Design – defines the target environment against business and compliance needs
- Deploy – runs the migration in phases, with backup and rollback positions in place
- Optimise – handles post-migration tuning, cost control, and ongoing managed support
Book an IT Strategy Session to walk through your environment with our team. As a specialist provider of IT support in Manchester, Cloud Geeni helps you get cloud migration right the first time.
