Residency not documented per workload
Do this first. It can invalidate an architecture and occasionally a procurement, and it costs a week to establish.
Azure · Readiness
Cloud migration readiness checklist
Twenty checks covering the governance, procurement and technical questions a council review will ask.
Why run this
What this checklist is for
Public sector cloud programmes fail at governance and procurement far more often than at technical migration. The technology is rarely the constraint.
The questions elected members ask — where is the data, who can reach it, how do we know we are not overpaying, what is the exit route — are entirely reasonable and only answerable if the architecture was designed with them in mind.
Run it with
CIO or Head of Digital
And with
Cloud architects and infrastructure leads
And with
Procurement and information governance
0 of 0 complete · 0%
The checklist
20 checks, in the order we would run them
Tick only what you can genuinely evidence today. An item you intend to do is not an item you have done, and scoring yourself generously here only produces a comfortable number and an uncomfortable project.
Section 1
Governance and procurement
Where these programmes actually lose their timeline.
Section 2
Landing zone and structure
Cheap to design now, genuinely disruptive to retrofit.
Section 3
Workload assessment
What should move, what should not, and what needs work first.
Section 4
Capability and handover
Whether your own team can run it afterwards.
What your score means
Read this against the number above
These bands are deliberately blunt. The middle band is where most organizations honestly sit, and it is a perfectly reasonable place to proceed from — provided the gaps are written down with owners rather than carried as optimism.
0–59%Significant gaps
Do not proceed yet. More than four in ten items are unaddressed, and the ones that fail here are usually the foundational ones that make everything after them harder.
60–84%Mostly ready, with known gaps
Proceed on a defined scope, with the outstanding items written into the plan as risks with owners and dates. This is the most common honest position.
85–100%Ready
The remaining gaps are small enough to handle during delivery rather than before it. Confirm the unticked items are genuinely minor rather than simply unexamined.
Your score highlights automatically as you tick items above. Nothing is saved, sent or tracked — refreshing the page clears it.
Closing the gaps
If you could not tick these, start here
The four items below are the ones whose absence causes the most trouble downstream. If your unticked items include any of these, they are worth addressing before the rest.
Landing zone not designed
Build the structure before the workloads. Management groups, policy and tagging cost very little now and are a project to retrofit.
No retain category
Reassess. A migration plan where everything moves has usually not examined whether everything should.
No handover specification
Write it into the contract with acceptance criteria. This is the difference between buying a capability and buying a dependency.
Want a second opinion on your score?
We will help you write the technical requirement and the governance schedule in language that survives procurement review — before you go to market.
Talk through your result Read the related guides We reply to every message within one business day.
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