Whether you run finance, logistics, manufacturing, or a services business, local servers in Accra are vulnerable to power issues, theft, and limited redundancy. Moving to cloud—AWS, Azure, or GCP—with African POPs and edge caching gives resilience and access from anywhere.
Step 1: Assess and prioritise
- Inventory apps, databases, file shares, and integrations; classify by business criticality.
- Identify quick wins: static sites, marketing sites, and file storage can move first.
- Note compliance/PII rules and data residency preferences (African regions if available).
Step 2: Build a secure landing zone
- Separate accounts/projects for prod/stage/dev; enforce MFA and SSO.
- Networking: VPC with private subnets, VPN/Direct Connect if needed, security groups, WAF.
- Logging/monitoring: centralised logs, metrics, alerts; baseline backups and retention.
- Secrets: managed secrets/parameter store; no keys in code.
Step 3: Migrate data safely
- Databases: snapshot + restore, or logical dump + import; validate with checksums.
- Files: sync with versioned object storage (S3/Blob); set lifecycle policies to control cost.
- Cutover window: plan read-only period; communicate to users; run smoke tests.
Step 4: Move applications
- Choose target: containers (ECS/EKS/GKE), serverless (Lambda/Functions), or managed PaaS (App Service/Cloud Run).
- External services: email (SES/SendGrid), SMS/WhatsApp, payment gateways with webhooks.
- Implement CI/CD; every deploy goes through tests and staging.
Step 5: Security and compliance
- Identity: SSO, least privilege IAM roles, periodic access reviews.
- Data: encrypt at rest and in transit; enable backups; test restores quarterly.
- App: dependency scanning, WAF, rate limiting, DDoS protections.
- Observability: uptime, latency, and error budgets; incident runbooks.
Step 6: FinOps—keep bills sane
- Tag resources; set budgets and alerts.
- Use reserved/savings plans for steady workloads; spot/auto scaling for bursty traffic.
- Turn on lifecycle rules for storage and log retention; compress where possible.
How 11TechWeave runs migrations
- Readiness assessment and landing-zone setup tailored to Ghana connectivity and compliance needs.
- Data + app migration waves with rollback plans and low-downtime cutovers.
- Security hardening, monitoring, and 24/7 support post-move.
- Cost governance with dashboards and alerts.