Feat/cloud migration blog

src/content/blog/cloud-migration-ascent.md

@@ -0,0 +1,105 @@
+---
+title:
+  Cloud Migration - What Mountains Can Teach Us About Digital Transformation
+author: Paulina Grochal
+pubDate: 2026-02-09
+tags:
+  [
+    "cloud-strategy",
+    "infrastructure",
+    "migration",
+    "digital-transformation",
+    "cloud",
+  ]
+description:
+  "Discover why successful cloud migration can reuse the same strategic approach
+  as climbing a mountain and learn more about cloud migration stages."
+image: ../../assets/blog/mountaineering.jpg
+---
+
+# Cloud Migration: What Mountains Can Teach Us About Digital Transformation
+
+When I started my adventure with mountaineering, I've learned that reaching the
+summit isn't about strength and technical details alone—it's about preparation,
+mindset, strategy, and the right team. The same is true for cloud migration.
+It’s crucial to split the work into phases, plan carefully, face changing
+conditions and be among trustworthy people with the right skills and motivation.
+
+Organizations that treat migration as a simple technical lift often struggle.
+Those that approach it like an expedition—with careful planning, staged
+progress, and expert guidance—reach their goals successfully and succeed in a
+cloud environment.
+
+## Preparation and planning
+
+Every successful expedition starts with a detailed plan. Your cloud migration
+should too:
+
+- **Assess your landscape** - understanding current infrastructure and
+  challenges are crucial for a successful migration plan. We need to know what
+  problems we want to solve first.
+- **Choose your path** - Choosing the right tools and models is crucial. Public,
+  private, or hybrid cloud? Each has different implications for cost, control,
+  and scalability
+- **Define your strategy** - Draft out your path to the cloud and see what needs
+  to be done Will you lift-and-shift for speed, re-platform for optimization, or
+  refactor for maximum cloud-native benefits?
+
+## Start the ascent
+
+Mountaineers ascend gradually, allowing time to adapt. Apply the same approach
+to your migration:
+
+- **Migrate incrementally** - Move non-critical workloads first to build
+  confidence and learn the terrain
+- **Run parallel systems** - During the transition state, run the workloads in
+  hybrid mode, gradually turning into cloud to minimize risks
+- **Test and validate** - Prove the model works before committing critical
+  operations
+
+## Acclimatize to Your New Environment
+
+Reaching altitude isn't enough—you need time to rest and adapt. In mountains, we
+need to optimize how our body reacts for less oxygen. With migration, we need to
+adapt to the new cloud environment. Once your first workloads are in the cloud,
+it’s time to optimize.
+
+- **Optimize performance** - Now that you have your workloads in the cloud, you
+  can dig deeper into how to make them more efficient and tune them accordingly.
+  Revise your services and their possibilities.
+- **Strengthen security** - Used to have everything locked in your on-premise
+  world, you have to realize what threats await you in the cloud world. But
+  there is nothing to worry about, with the implementation of best practices,
+  cloud-specific security controls and compliance measures you can reach the
+  secure environment.
+- **Control costs** - We can just move everything to the cloud and make it work,
+  but to reach efficiency and a reasonable end-of-month bill from our provider,
+  the setup requires a closer look. Automation is crucial here, as well as
+  getting the benefits of the cloud pay-as-you-go model.
+
+## Navigate the Final Ascent
+
+The summit push requires focus. This migration step also requires special
+attention to details and can bring new challenges.
+
+- **Build resilience** - Your services are overall stable, however we need to
+  prepare for surprises like, for example, service downtime. Make sure you align
+  with redundancy strategies and keep your resources highly available.
+- **Monitoring and scaling** - Real-time visibility into performance and costs
+  is essential for your success as well as scalable archotecture.
+- **Continuously refine** - to gain as much benefit from your migration as
+  possible, refine regularly your cloud environment and explore deeper the
+  possibilities the cloud gives you.
+
+## Enjoy the views!
+
+After months of hard work, you finally reached your goal and are standing on the
+top of a high mountain with your head in the clouds. The feeling of great
+achievement is great.
+
+Successfully migrated organizations report faster time-to-market, improved
+scalability, and reduced infrastructure overhead. But these benefits require
+commitment to the journey—not just reaching the cloud, but optimizing
+continuously once there.
+
+**Are you ready to begin your cloud expedition?**