Cloud Migration Consulting
Cloud migrations fail when they are designed for slides and not for reality.
I help enterprises migrate from on-premise data centers or legacy cloud infrastructure to AWS, Oracle Cloud (OCI), or multi-cloud environments – with a migration plan that is built to survive contact with real teams, real deadlines, and real constraints. I have led these programmes for Tier-1 banks, Fortune 500, and some of largest technology companies. My track record across all of them: zero production outages.
I engage as Senior Cloud Architect, as Technical Lead, or as the Fractional CTO of the programme – depending on what the engagement needs. I work directly with C-level leadership, own the architectural direction, and stay accountable for the outcome.
Zero production outages
Across all completed cloud migrations – including a core banking platform migrated under active wartime conditions
OCI + AWS multi-cloud
Rare genuine depth in Oracle Cloud Infrastructure alongside AWS – most cloud architects are AWS or Azure only
C-level direct engagement
I report to and work with CTOs, CIOs, and Boards – not through layers of project management between architecture and decision-making
🏆 Referenced by McKinsey, AWS, and Euromoney – the wartime cloud migration of Raiffeisen Bank Ukraine’s core banking platform under active military attack and emergency central bank legal waiver became one of the most globally cited cases in emergency cloud migration. Zero business outages.
Who This Is For
Cloud migration consulting is not one-size-fits-all. The situations I work in best are the ones most consultants find uncomfortable.
Your migration plan exists but delivery keeps stalling
Most cloud migration plans are technically correct and operationally unrealistic. The sequencing ignores real team capacity, the dependencies aren’t mapped, and the first phase completes while the next three stall. I build plans that are designed to survive execution – not impress in a slide deck.
Your infrastructure is undocumented – you don’t know what you’re migrating
I have led migrations where years of staff turnover had erased most knowledge of what was running in the data centers. Starting with a reliable “as-is” map – built from actual observation rather than assumed documentation – is how you avoid discovering critical dependencies mid-migration.
You operate in a regulated industry where downtime is not recoverable
Banking, healthcare, insurance, gambling – platforms where an outage is a regulatory compliance event and a direct financial loss. Cloud migration in these environments requires a different discipline of risk management, cutover planning, and rollback testing than standard enterprise IT migrations.
You need to exit your current cloud or switch providers
Cloud-to-cloud migrations are different from on-prem-to-cloud in ways that most migration playbooks don’t account for. Data egress costs, API compatibility, proprietary service dependencies, and configuration drift all create migration complexity that doesn’t appear in standard assessment tools.
Your deadline is fixed and cannot move
Regulatory deadlines, contract end dates, data center lease expirations – migrations with immovable timelines require a different approach: ruthless prioritisation, parallel workstreams, and a plan that explicitly identifies what gets cut rather than hoping everything fits. I have completed migrations under exactly these conditions.
Your cloud costs have grown out of control during or after migration
Cloud cost surprises are almost always a sequencing and governance failure, not a cloud provider problem. Cost structure, budgets, and usage expectations need to be defined before large workloads move – not discovered when invoices arrive three months later. I build FinOps into the migration, not onto it.
What I Do – The Full Scope
A cloud migration engagement is not a single service. These are the components that make migrations actually complete.
1
Current-state assessment – the real infrastructure map
Before any migration can be planned, there needs to be a reliable map of what is actually running – dependencies, data flows, integration points, and the systems that nobody wrote down because the people who built them moved on. This is discovery work, and it cannot be skipped. The quality of the migration plan is directly proportional to the quality of the current-state assessment.
2
Target architecture and cloud design
The target architecture defines what the migrated environment looks like – cloud provider selection, landing zone design, network topology, IAM structure, compute and storage patterns. For regulated environments, compliance requirements are embedded in the architecture from the start, not added as a layer after the design is finalised. For multi-cloud engagements (OCI + AWS or others), I design consistent governance across providers from day one.
3
Migration planning – sequencing, dependencies, and wave design
The migration plan defines which systems move in which order, what the dependencies between them are, how the parallel workstreams are structured, and what the go/no-go criteria are at each phase gate. A plan that ignores actual team capacity or internal political constraints will stall after the first phase. I build plans against real constraints – people, deadlines, systems, and risk tolerance – rather than against theoretical best practice.
4
Security, compliance, and governance from day one
Security and compliance are the two most common reasons cloud migrations stall. When they are treated as a final checklist rather than a design input, the migration reaches cutover and cannot proceed because the security review fails. I build identity and access management, network security, audit logging, encryption, and regulatory control mapping into the architecture and migration process from the start. This approach has supported SOC-2, HIPAA, DORA, GxP, and banking regulatory requirements across completed migrations.
5
FinOps and cost visibility – before workloads move
Cloud cost surprises happen when nobody owns the cost model before the migration begins. I define cost structure, budget expectations, and usage thresholds as part of the migration planning – so finance teams have clear answers, engineering teams make cost-informed architecture decisions, and the business doesn’t discover the real cost of its cloud estate six months after go-live.
6
Delivery leadership and team coordination
For larger engagements, I serve as the Technical Lead or Fractional CTO of the migration programme – managing internal teams, external partners, and C-level communication simultaneously. This includes Architecture Board participation, risk escalation, vendor management, and the cross-functional coordination that determines whether a migration completes or stalls at the organisational level rather than the technical one.
What Makes This Engagement Different
There are many cloud migration consultants. These are the things that are harder to find.
I have led migrations under conditions most consultants haven’t encountered
A core banking migration under active military attack. Three data centers with no documentation. A proprietary French cloud with no migration community or tooling. An emergency exit required in weeks rather than months. The difficulty of your situation is the context in which my experience is most directly applicable.
OCI expertise – genuinely rare in the cloud migration market
Most cloud migration consultants have AWS or Azure experience. Oracle Cloud Infrastructure (OCI) has a different architectural model, different IAM structure, different network topology, and different governance patterns. If your organisation uses OCI or is considering it, the market for consultants with genuine OCI depth – not repainted AWS knowledge – is very thin. I hold OCI Certified Multicloud Architect Professional (2025).
I run parallel engagements – which keeps my knowledge current
Consultants who work exclusively with one client for extended periods often lose their market view. I maintain parallel engagements across different industries – which means my understanding of what is actually happening in cloud infrastructure, governance, and migration practice reflects the current state of the market, not a snapshot from a previous engagement.
Architecture ownership – not advisory only
Many senior cloud consultants produce recommendations that the client organisation then tries to implement without the person who designed them. I can own the architecture and its execution – staying present through delivery, adapting the design as real constraints emerge, and being accountable for the result rather than for the quality of the presentation that preceded it.
Cloud Platforms
☁️ Amazon Web Services (AWS)
Full migration lifecycle. AWS SA Professional certified. EC2, VPC, RDS, EKS, Lambda@Edge, WAF, Shield, CloudFront, IAM, Control Tower. Landing zone design, multi-account governance.
🔮 Oracle Cloud Infrastructure (OCI)
OCI Certified Multicloud Architect Professional (2025). Multi-tenancy architecture, IAM compartments, OCI network topology, SAML federation. Currently leading live OCI + AWS multi-cloud governance.
🌐 Multi-Cloud
Consistent governance across multiple cloud providers simultaneously. Unified Terraform module approach, comparable security baselines, integrated cost visibility. Built correctly from the start – not retrofitted.
🏭 On-Premise & Hybrid
Data center exit, DC-to-cloud sequencing, hybrid connectivity design. Experience with legacy mainframe (COBOL/IBM z Series), physical factory DC infrastructure, and multi-DC environments across geographies.
Industries With Completed Migrations
🏦
Banking & Financial Services
Core banking platform migration under wartime conditions. DORA compliance benchmarking for Tier-1 Spanish bank. Emergency infrastructure protection.
🏘️
Real Estate Technology
3 European data centers to AWS for one of the world’s largest real estate tech groups. 1.5 years, zero production outages.
🏭
Manufacturing & Industrial
Independent PoC evaluation for Jabil (Fortune 500 EMS). Factory DC-to-cloud feasibility, OT/IT convergence, Azure + AWS dual-cloud assessment.
💊
Healthcare & Pharma
Legacy pharma CRM modernisation for US market entry. SOC-2, HIPAA, GxP compliance architecture. Go microservices PoC delivering 4× throughput improvement.
🚗
Mobility & Automotive
COBOL mainframe to cloud-native microservices for SIXT Leasing SE. Unified Kubernetes platform on AWS EKS. Penetration-tested security architecture.
How the Engagement Works
📞
Step 1 · Free 30-min call
We discuss your situation, your migration goals, your timeline constraints, and the specific risks that concern you most. You get direct technical assessment – not a sales conversation.
🔍
Step 2 · Scoped assessment
For most engagements, we begin with a structured discovery phase – current-state assessment, risk identification, and a migration readiness report. This produces the input for the migration plan and the architectural design.
🚀
Step 3 · Delivery
Architecture + plan + delivery support. I stay present through the migration – not just through the planning phase. The engagement can scale from advisory to full Technical Lead or Fractional CTO depending on what the programme needs.
Engagement formats: Advisory retainer · Project-based (assessment + plan) · Full delivery leadership (Technical Lead / Fractional CTO) · Independent review of an existing migration plan or PoC · Emergency consultation for stalled migrations
Common Questions
We already have an internal cloud team. Why would we need an external consultant? +
Internal teams are usually strong at operating what exists — they know the systems, the stakeholders, and the constraints. Cloud migration requires a different skill set: sequencing migrations across interdependent systems, designing cloud-native target architectures, managing risk at the programme level, and applying patterns from previous migrations that the internal team hasn’t done before. External expertise doesn’t replace internal knowledge – it provides what internal teams typically don’t have: migration-specific pattern recognition from similar programmes, and an architectural perspective that isn’t shaped by how things have always been done internally.
How long does a cloud migration typically take? +
It depends almost entirely on the complexity of what’s being migrated and the capacity of the team doing it — not on the cloud itself. Small-to-medium environments with clear documentation and dedicated migration teams can complete in 3–6 months. Enterprise environments with hundreds of applications, regulatory requirements, and teams with split capacity between migration and BAU typically run 12–24 months. Emergency situations – where the timeline is dictated externally – require a completely different approach: ruthless prioritisation and accepting that some systems move later. I have delivered migrations in 6 weeks under emergency conditions and 1.5 years under normal programme conditions.
We have a migration plan already. Can you review it? +
Yes – independent review of an existing migration plan is one of the most valuable early engagements. What I look for: dependency gaps that will create blockers mid-programme, compliance and security assumptions that won’t survive a real audit, cost model assumptions that will produce surprises at scale, rollback plans that haven’t been tested against the actual cutover scenarios, and sequencing decisions that prioritise technical convenience over business risk. Many plans look correct at the architecture level and break down at the delivery planning level.
Our migration stalled. Can you help restart it? +
Stalled migrations almost always stall for the same reasons: the plan was built for an ideal version of the organisation rather than the real one, or a security/compliance gate was not anticipated and is now blocking progress, or team capacity was never actually dedicated to the programme and BAU work kept winning. Understanding why a migration stalled – honestly, not diplomatically – is the prerequisite for fixing it. I have been brought into programmes specifically to diagnose and restart stalled migrations. This usually requires a structured assessment of what has and hasn’t been done, a realistic re-plan, and sometimes a difficult conversation with leadership about what the programme actually needs to succeed.
Do you work with small businesses or only enterprise? +
I work with both enterprises and SMBs – what matters is the complexity of the problem, not the size of the company. Some smaller businesses have infrastructure challenges that are genuinely complex: regulatory requirements, high-availability platforms, undocumented legacy systems, or fast-growing environments that have outgrown what a managed service provider can handle. If that describes your situation, I am happy to help and will bring the same level of rigour I apply to enterprise programmes. If your infrastructure is straightforward and a managed service provider would serve you better, I will tell you that honestly in the first call.
Ready to talk about your cloud migration?
In 30 minutes I can tell you whether your situation maps to what I do – what the real risks are in your specific migration context, what’s most likely to go wrong, and what a first engagement would look like.
No sales pitch. A direct technical conversation about your migration, your constraints, and your options.