Five Questions to Ask Before Your Data Center Migration

A data center migration is rarely about the move itself. It is about the decisions you make in the six weeks before anything is unracked. The teams that get migration right almost always answer the same five questions first — and the ones that struggle skip past at least one of them.

1. What is the REALcost of an hour of downtime?

Most teams have a number from finance. Very few have a number from the customer journey. The gap between those two figures is where migration risk lives.

2. Who owns the rollback decision?

If the answer is a committee, you do not have a rollback plan — you have a meeting. Name a single person, write their phone number on the runbook, and rehearse the call.

3. Have you actually inventoried what is in the racks?

Your CMDB is wrong. It is always wrong. Plan a physical walk-through with photos and serials before quoting any vendor.

4. What does success look like at T+30 days?

Cutover is not the finish line. Define the SLOs you expect to hit a month later — latency, error rate, ticket volume — and the team that owns each one.

5. Are you migrating, or are you modernising?

Doing both at once doubles the risk and triples the timeline. Pick a lane, ship it, and revisit modernisation from a stable baseline.