Beyond lift and shift: the 2026 guide to cloud migration

Executive Summary

Microsoft’s 2025 Work Trend Index, reveals the emergence of a new type of organisation: the Frontier Firm. These businesses combine AI-operated machine intelligence with human judgement. Speaking to 31,000 workers across 31 countries, Microsoft found that within the next 2–5 years, every organisation is expected to embark on the journey to becoming a Frontier Firm. 

Centred around hybrid teams, this new business model encourages human employees to be supported by AI agents. Whether you’re migrating for the first time, or modernising at scale, AI, data, and application innovation must sit at the heart of your cloud strategy. 

The increasing demand now being placed on IT infrastructure by AI and other changes is causing 82% of business leaders to view 2026 as a pivotal year to rethink key aspects of strategy and operations. It is the perfect time to consider cloud migration. 

Where planning for cloud migration may traditionally have started with a product choice, the first thing you should be considering in 2026 is outcomes. Because once you start talking about products, you’ve already started down a particular path, which may close off valuable opportunities. 

In this guide, we reveal six ways to ensure a successful migration in 2026, outlining how an outcome-based strategy can deliver greater agility for CTOs, by focusing cloud investment on high-value, resilient workloads.  

1. Plan for success: strategy before servers  

Cost-effective cloud migration starts by identifying how outcomes can be improved within your business. But to be truly cost effective, you need ways to assess and identify how cloud computing can improve your legacy systems and data handling. Start by asking: 

• Which functions need greater agility to support growth? 

• Where can automation and AI deliver measurable productivity gains? 

• How do we reduce risk exposure while controlling cost? 

A successful migration starts long before the first workload is transferred. It begins with understanding where the cloud can deliver tangible business value. This is where technology partners such as BCN can help organisations define outcomes before choosing solutions; ensuring each step aligns with strategy, not just technology. 

2. Migrate with purpose

By migrating selected workloads and data to the cloud, you’ll be putting your business in the best position to benefit from advanced analytics, data innovation, and an increased competitive advantage, particularly concerning AI. Prior to migration, you should map out your business functions, look at how your processes are running, and how they are being managed right now. And ask these three questions: 

• Are those processes manual? 

• Is there a team of people that do those things?  

• What’s the outcome right now?  

Having done this, you can then identify where AI, automation, and advanced analytics might speed those processes up, boost productivity, and increase their value. But whether your goal is data readiness, greater agility, or future proofing, the first step is putting the right foundations in place. And a well-planned migration gives you the agility to move fast, stay secure, and scale smartly. 

3. Reduce migration effort 

In some cases, the effort of moving everything to the cloud is simply too high, or it doesn’t make economical or strategic sense. And in these instances, we’re starting to see a shift to a more hybrid way of working for some, with multi-cloud options available for partners that demand resilience. 

Where is the best application of resource? Where’s the best use of budget? The days of moving every workload to the cloud are gone. And avoiding the unnecessary migration of legacy systems and workloads will be a key factor in 2026. With hybrid models (utilising tools like Azure Stack or Azure Local, for example) businesses can keep legacy, or less critical systems on-premises, while unifying governance and management.  

This reduces migration effort and cost by avoiding unnecessary transfer of legacy systems that are no longer in use. And IT teams can maintain operational consistency with cloud-like governance across hybrid environments. This approach supports business agility by focusing cloud investment on high-value, resilient workloads like ecommerce platforms.   

4. Avoid on-premises cost increases

Rising costs in private hosting and upcoming changes in VMware/Broadcom and Citrix licensing are making cloud migration more financially appealing for medium-sized businesses.  

Elsewhere, many organisations are running aging, on-premises hardware that is reaching end-of-life, resulting in greater risks and higher costs associated with outdated hardware (which requires more support). And for businesses currently running an on-premises operation, likely operating end-of-life servers, removing hardware could provide considerable savings. 

However, whilst migrating to cloud services removes the need to manage hardware, and provides a well-maintained infrastructure, it still comes with added licensing costs. 2026 will see more CTOs, IT directors, and infrastructure teams seriously reconsidering open-source, Linux-based virtualisation. 

5. Consider your security and governance

Keeping up with all the security updates that comes with operating in the cloud can become burdensome for in-house IT teams, who prefer to outsource these requirements, with the correct SLAs in place. And you should expect 24/7/365 security detection and response services, with continuous monitoring, so you can stay ahead of threats and maintain compliance without compromise. 

With many on-premises customers running outdated backend systems, you can mitigate the considerable security and governance concerns of a full ‘lift and shift’ migration by being more selective in what gets migrated. By working with the right partner, you can unify the governance management of IT, whilst deciding what’s migrated, and what’s left on-premises.  

With a free Cloud Readiness Assessment from BCN, you can access expert insights into your current environment, and receive a clear roadmap for security and governance when you migrate – all at no cost to you. 

6. Understand the new cloud landscape 

Cloud migration doesn’t need to be a frantic rush to get everything online. In 2026, the most successful cloud strategies will be targeted, outcome-driven, and built for resilience. Businesses need to think about whether they are too dependent on a single platform or provider and consider whether a single- or multi-region approach might be best for them. 

As a result, solutions that may have previously focused on a single cloud provider are now being reconsidered, with multi-cloud conversations becoming easier and cost-effective for small- and medium-sized businesses.  

However, this increase in choice is also bringing greater complexity, and a recent survey of 600 IT experts and leaders suggesting that security is of particular concern.  

The checklist: 7 questions every CTO should be able to answer 

To ensure that your cloud migration delivers the very best outcomes, it makes sense to work with a technology partner. However, not all technology partners are the same.  

To help you identify whether your cloud provider will deliver the best results for your business, BCN’s Chris Henry, Head of Azure Centre of Excellence, has created a checklist of 7 questions every CTO should know the answers to.  

1.Do you optimise costs in Azure with rightsizing and reservation orders?  

Regularly reviewing your cloud environment to ensure you are getting the most value from it, and are not overpaying, is integral to managing your cloud costs. Rightsizing ensures that you are not paying for overprovisioning resources that you aren’t using but also ensures you are running on the latest product versions, where you will often get more performance from the underlying hardware, often at the same cost, or sometimes less. Committing to consumption spend via reservations orders means that you save a considerable amount in consumption, for resources that you know you are going to consume anyway. 

2.Do you configure budget alerts and thresholds to manage unexpected spikes or predicted spikes in your cloud spending?  

Ensure you are not subject to bill shocks when unexpected costs arise in your Azure environment. By being alerted about these spikes early on, you can avoid overrunning on your budgeted Azure spend. 

3. Do you fully cost any new solutions or changes in your Azure environment? 

Ensure that you fully cost any new solutions in Azure so that you can predict the consumption over the life of the workload and include any scaling increases to support your future user demand. 

4. In the event of a business continuity scenario will your environments be configured to meet your recovery time objectives (RTOs) and recovery point objectives (RPOs)? 

Often companies rely on being able to spin up resources on demand, in the event of a disaster recovery (DR) scenario. But if this also affects other Azure users, such as with a regional or platform failure, resource deployment is often in demand, and this causes contention. Only by using elements such as high-availability, geo-redundancy, Azure Site Recovery (ASR), and reserved compute can you guarantee the availability of these resources in the event of a DR scenario. Additionally, your backup and retention policy should be configured to ensure you can meet your RPOs, are you using elements such as point-in-time restore. 

5. In the event of a security breach or ransomware attack will your backups be protected and isolated so you can recover your data if encrypted or lost? 

Elements like immutable or air-gapped backups, as well as multi-admin approval deletion, are important to protect against malicious actors who may access your data. They will often attempt to delete or encrypt backups first to prevent recovery and try to force you to pay the ransom. 

6. What is the maximum amount of time your business can afford to be down? 

What’s the revenue cost for each hour you are down? Knowing the answer to this questions means that you architect your environment to meet this goal, investing in resiliency and multi-region configurations, if required, to reduce the impact of single points of failure to your business. 

7. Have you independently audited your environment for security i.e. penetration testing? 

This will highlight any security misconfigurations and exposed public endpoints and reveal any vulnerabilities that could be used by threat actors to access your environment and workloads.

Beyond Lift and Shift: Start Your Cloud Journey the Right Way

Businesses will be considering cloud migration from different scenarios in 2026. Some will address the growing demands on existing and outdated IT infrastructure, whilst others will already be in the cloud, but wanting to take advantage of AI tools, data analytics, flexible infrastructure, and pay-as-you-go costing. 

Whether it’s having the right environment to take full advantage of AI, or a desire to develop faster, and adapt to new working habits, 2026 presents some incredible opportunities for companies looking to migrate. 

But it’s critical to work with the right partner. One that not only has the experience and expertise to help you migrate successfully, but that will ensure your move is pragmatic and right-sized for your business.  Read about how BCN migrated Southway Housing Trust successfully, saving them over 8,000 hours and £200,000.

Working with a certified Cloud Solution Provider (CSP) like BCN can also help you secure exclusive funding support, which is only available through a partner-led process, and can offset your migration costs by up to 50%. For example, BCN partners have secured up to £30,000 of migration funding from Microsoft Azure by partnering with BCN.

Discover BCNs full range of Azure services and all your options for migration with a fully-funded Infrastructure Assessment from the Azure experts at BCN.