Lift-and-shift projects rarely succeed by simply dockerising legacy workloads. Regulated organisations must align with enterprise disaster recovery (DR) and data-sovereignty rules before shipping anything to production.
Field Note
A recent engagement revealed that the target hyperscaler operated two “independent” data centres within 50 miles of each other. The architecture had to be reworked to meet regulatory requirements for geographic separation.
What to Do
- Validate provider site separation against your business continuity plan.
- Rehearse failover regularly; assume regional outages are possible.
Myth 2: “Every Service Is Everywhere”
Regions and availability zones vary in maturity; new features often launch in a single geography.
Checklist
- Inventory required cloud services up front and confirm availability in each target region.
- Document acceptable substitutes (e.g., managed databases, queueing services) before rollout.
- Budget time for compliance and security reviews when adopting preview/beta services.
Final Advice
Perform rigorous due diligence on provider capabilities, map them to regulatory obligations, and maintain an escalation path with your cloud account team for service gaps.