Migrating to the Cloud
In this episode Chris is joined by Suzanne Tedrick — Azure Infrastructure Specialist at Microsoft and award-winning author of Women of Color in Tech — to unpack what it really takes to migrate applications and workloads to the cloud successfully.
Key topics covered in this episode:
- Why migrations fail — the 2020 Cloud Security Alliance finding that 90% of respondents experienced a failed migration, and why most root causes come back to people and process rather than technology
- The Cloud Adoption Framework — Microsoft’s holistic guidance covering not just technical steps but the business strategy, organisational readiness, and cultural changes required for a sustainable migration
- Assess before you move — understanding your current application portfolio, identifying which workloads to rehost, refactor, rearchitect, or retire, and setting realistic timelines
- Governance from day one — defining who has access to what, managing cost controls, enforcing policy, and avoiding the chaos of ungoverned multi-cloud sprawl
- Stakeholder alignment — bringing together infrastructure teams, application owners, business stakeholders, and support partners to act as a coordinated migration symphony rather than isolated silos
- Incremental progress — using the Cloud Adoption Framework as a guide, not a checklist; taking measured steps forward rather than trying to migrate everything at once
- Diversity and inclusion in tech — Suzanne shares insights from her book Women of Color in Tech, exploring how diverse teams build better, more equitable technology products
Resources mentioned: Microsoft Cloud Adoption Framework, Microsoft Learn, and Microsoft Assessments.
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