Author: Travis Langhals, Principal Architect at UTurn Data Solutions

Cloud migration is often seen as the finish line. In reality, it’s just the starting point. Moving workloads to AWS is a significant milestone, but ensuring long-term success requires ongoing optimization.

Many organizations encounter unexpected cost overruns, performance issues, and security vulnerabilities in the weeks following a migration. Without a structured plan, the benefits of cloud adoption—scalability, flexibility, and cost savings—can be diminished by poor management practices.

There are five key areas organizations must focus on after migration to ensure a smooth transition:

• Monitoring and performance optimization to ensure workloads run efficiently
• Cost governance and optimization to prevent unnecessary spending
• Security hardening to address vulnerabilities and compliance requirements
• Automation to streamline operations and reduce manual workload
• Continuous improvement to maximize the long-term value of AWS

Let’s take a deeper dive into each one.

Step 1: Monitor and Optimize Performance

Once workloads are running in AWS, real-time monitoring is essential to track system health, prevent performance bottlenecks, and optimize resource utilization.

Key actions in the first 90 days:

• Enable AWS monitoring tools – Set up AWS CloudWatch, RDS Performance Insights, and AWS X-Ray to track infrastructure and application performance.
• Identify performance bottlenecks – Monitor CPU, Memory, Throughput, IOPS, and latency to ensure workloads are not resource constrained.
• Right-size instances – Use Compute Optimizer to assess EC2 instance usage and adjust instance types based on actual performance data.
• Implement auto-scaling – Utilize Auto Scaling groups and scaling policies to dynamically adjust resources in response to fluctuations in demand.

Organizations that actively monitor performance early in the post-migration phase can prevent resource waste and performance degradation before they become larger issues.

Step 2: Implement Cost Governance and Optimization

Without active management, AWS costs can escalate quickly. Many organizations assume cloud expenses will naturally decrease due to scalability, but in reality, inefficient resource allocation and lack of governance can lead to unnecessary spending.

Steps to control costs:

• Track spending trends – Enable AWS Cost Explorer and AWS Budgets to gain visibility into cloud expenses.
• Leverage pricing models – Use AWS Savings Plans and Reserved Instances for predictable workloads to reduce hourly rates.
• Automate cost alerts – Set up notifications for unexpected cost spikes to catch runaway costs before they become significant.
• Identify underutilized resources – Decommission unused instances and storage volumes to reduce waste.
• Enable data lifecycle management – Apply S3 lifecycle rules and AWS Backup plans to automatically transition to lower cost storage and expire inactive data

A proactive approach to cost governance prevents financial surprises and ensures AWS adoption remains economically viable.

Step 3: Strengthen Security Posture

Understanding the AWS shared responsibility model is essential for ensuring a strong security posture of migrated applications. AWS provides robust foundational infrastructure security along with extensive security capabilities and services, but customers remain responsible for securing their workloads, configurations, and data within the cloud environment. Without proper implementation of security controls on the customer side, misconfigured permissions and overlooked vulnerabilities can still pose significant risks despite AWS’s secure infrastructure.

Security priorities post-migration:

• Review IAM roles and permissions – Enable IAM Access Analyzer and ensure users and applications follow the principle of least privilege.
• Enable AWS security tools – Deploy AWS GuardDuty, AWS Inspector, and AWS Security Hub to detect and mitigate threats.
• Apply encryption everywhere – Implement AWS Key Management Service (KMS) for data at rest and enforce TLS encryption for data in transit.
• Conduct a security review – Perform an AWS Well-Architected Security Assessment to validate compliance and security best practices.

Addressing security early in the cloud journey reduces the risk of breaches and ensures workloads are protected from the outset.

Step 4: Automate Key Operational Tasks

ClickOps (manual cloud operations) increases the risk of misconfigurations due to human error and significantly slows down delivery times, hampering efficient response to business needs. AWS provides automation tools to streamline maintenance, scaling, and infrastructure management.

Key automation initiatives:

• Automate routine tasks – Use AWS Lambda and AWS Systems Manager to automate maintenance workflows.
• Implement disaster recovery – Set up AWS Backup to ensure data protection and rapid recovery in case of failures.
• Manage infrastructure as code (IaC) – Use Terraform or AWS CloudFormation to standardize and automate infrastructure deployment.
• Enable event-driven automation – Configure Amazon EventBridge to trigger automated responses to operational events.

Organizations that invest in automation early reduce operational overhead and improve overall cloud efficiency.

Step 5: Establish a Continuous Improvement Plan

AWS is constantly evolving, with new services, pricing models, and best practices emerging regularly. Companies that embrace a continuous improvement approach to cloud gain a significant competitive edge through enhanced operational efficiency, accelerated innovation, reduced costs, and superior performance—driving greater business agility and market responsiveness.

Ongoing optimization strategies:

• Conduct a post-migration review – Identify lessons learned and areas for improvement.
• Develop a FinOps strategy – Optimize cloud spending while enabling innovation to maximize business value and financial efficiency.
• Build a Cloud Center of Excellence (CCoE) – Establish a team responsible for cloud governance, best practices, and training.
• Schedule quarterly Well-Architected Reviews – Assess security, cost, and performance optimizations every three months.
• Monitor AWS innovations – Stay informed about new AWS services that could enhance business operations.

Long-term cloud success depends on organizations proactively refining their AWS environment instead of reacting to inefficiencies.

Conclusion: From Migration to Optimization

The migration process doesn’t end when workloads are deployed in AWS. The first 90 days post-migration set the stage for long-term performance, cost efficiency, security, and operational maturity.

Organizations that actively monitor workloads, enforce cost controls, strengthen security, automate key tasks, and commit to continuous improvement are far more likely to achieve the full benefits of AWS.

Get Expert Guidance on AWS Optimization

UTurn Data Solutions specializes in helping organizations develop their cloud migration strategy and optimizing their AWS environments post-migration. Whether you need support with cost reduction, security hardening, automation or performance tuning, our team of cloud experts can guide you through the critical first 90 days and beyond.

Schedule a post-migration assessment today: Contact Us