Cloud migration projects fail most often not because the technology is wrong, but because the decision to migrate was made before the right questions were answered. Moving workloads to AWS, Azure, or Google Cloud is straightforward once the groundwork is done — but the groundwork matters more than the migration itself.
Questions to answer before you decide
Before committing to a cloud migration, get clear answers to these:
- What problem are you solving? Cost reduction, reliability, remote access, scaling, and disaster recovery are all valid reasons — but they lead to different migration strategies.
- What are your data residency requirements? Some regulated industries in Kenya require data to stay in-country or in-region. If your sector has these requirements, they constrain your provider choice.
- What does your current infrastructure cost, fully loaded? Include hardware refresh cycles, software licences, power, cooling, IT management time, and the cost of outages. Cloud costs are easier to justify when you've honestly accounted for on-premises costs.
- What connectivity do your offices and users have? Cloud services require reliable internet. If your primary office has a single 10 Mbps ADSL line, migrating to cloud-hosted applications before fixing connectivity is adding a dependency on something fragile.
Choosing a provider for Kenya
All three major providers now have African-region infrastructure:
- AWS (Amazon Web Services) — af-south-1 region in Cape Town. Strong overall service catalogue, broad third-party tooling support.
- Microsoft Azure — South Africa North (Johannesburg) and South Africa West (Cape Town). Strong for Microsoft-stack environments (Windows Server, SQL Server, Office 365). Azure Arc and hybrid scenarios are well-supported.
- Google Cloud Platform — africa-south1 in Johannesburg. Strong Kubernetes (GKE) and data analytics tooling. Best choice if you're heavily using Google Workspace.
For most Kenyan businesses, the latency difference between these providers is small — all three African regions are substantially better than routing to Europe or the US. Choose based on which services align with your workloads and which platform your team already knows.
The 6 Rs: how to categorise each workload
Before migrating anything, classify each workload using the 6 Rs framework:
- Rehost (Lift and Shift) — Move the workload as-is to cloud virtual machines. Fastest, no re-engineering required, but you don't get full cloud benefits.
- Replatform — Move with minor optimisations (e.g., switch from self-managed MySQL to a managed RDS instance). Moderate effort, better operational overhead.
- Refactor / Re-architect — Redesign for cloud-native architecture. Most effort, most long-term benefit.
- Repurchase — Replace with a SaaS product (e.g., replace your on-premises HR system with BambooHR). Often overlooked but frequently the right answer.
- Retire — Decommission workloads you no longer use. Migrations are a good opportunity to find and shut down forgotten systems.
- Retain — Keep on-premises for now, due to compliance, latency, or cost reasons. Not everything needs to move.
Most migrations are a mix of all six. Don't assume everything goes to the cloud.
Kenya-specific considerations
Load shedding resilience. Cloud-hosted systems continue running during power cuts at your offices. This is a genuine operational advantage in Kenya — your email, file storage, and applications stay available even when your office has no power.
Egress costs. Cloud providers charge for data leaving their networks. If you have high-bandwidth workloads — video, large file transfers, media processing — model your egress costs carefully before committing.
Support time zones. Ensure your cloud provider's support plan covers East African Time business hours (UTC+3). Many default enterprise support plans are US-timezone-centric.
Internet redundancy before cloud migration. If your cloud adoption increases dependency on internet connectivity, establish redundancy first. A primary fibre ISP plus a 4G/5G failover is a minimum reasonable setup for a cloud-dependent office.
Pre-migration checklist
- Complete inventory of all current servers, services, applications, and dependencies
- Document who uses each system and for what purpose
- Identify systems with regulatory or compliance constraints that affect data location
- Estimate cloud costs for each workload using the provider's cost calculator before committing
- Identify a pilot workload — low risk, non-critical — to migrate first and learn from
- Set up monitoring and alerting in the cloud environment before migrating production workloads
- Define rollback criteria: what would trigger you to reverse the migration for each workload?
- Plan for a parallel running period — run old and new environments simultaneously before cutting over
- Test DNS cutover in a staging environment before doing it in production
- Brief all staff on what's changing and when — access patterns, VPN requirements, file locations
Migration projects that skip the parallel running period and the rollback planning are the ones that cause unplanned outages. Budget time for both.
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