How enterprise architecture helps with cloud migration

Cloud migration has become essential for organisations modernising their digital services, but the process can quickly become complex, costly and slow when not guided by a clear structure. Studies consistently show that cloud transformations fail when organisations lack visibility, governance and coherent decision-making.  

Enterprise architecture solves these challenges by aligning business strategy, technology, data and operations around a unified migration plan. It provides the frameworks, roadmaps and governance needed to move to the cloud in a controlled, secure and cost-efficient way. It offers teams a clear view of what to migrate, when to migrate it and how to deliver the business outcomes expected from cloud. 

In this blog, we explore how enterprise architecture supports cloud migration, the capabilities it provides and how organisations can use it to deliver faster, safer and more value-driven cloud programmes. 

What enterprise architecture means in cloud migration

Enterprise architecture helps businesses understand how their capabilities, applications, data flows and technology platforms fit together so they can smoothly transition to the cloud. It offers clarity across four core areas: 

• What systems exist today 
• How they connect and depend on each other 
• How the future cloud architecture should operate 
• Which steps are needed to migrate safely and incrementally. 

Without this context, cloud migration can lead to performance problems, security gaps, cost overruns and delays. Enterprise architecture provides the visibility and alignment needed to avoid these issues. 

Resources such as the Microsoft Cloud Adoption Framework reinforce the importance of architectural foundations, landing zones, security baselines and governance when preparing for cloud migration at enterprise scale. 

Why enterprise architecture is essential for cloud migration

Enterprise architecture enhances cloud migration across strategic, operational and technical dimensions through: 

1. Complete visibility across the application estate

Large organisations often lack a single view of their systems, making cloud migration risky. Enterprise architecture documents: 

• Application inventories 
• Dependencies 
• Data flows 
• Integration patterns 
• Infrastructure and hosting 
• Business criticality. 

This visibility prevents migrations that break key services or overlook important interdependencies. 

2. Prioritisation of workloads for migration

Enterprise architecture identifies which workloads should be: 

• Rehosted 
• Re-platformed 
• Refactored 
• Replaced 
• Retired

This prevents wasted effort on low value systems and accelerates value by prioritising high impact workloads. 

3. Defining target cloud architecture

A well-defined cloud architecture reduces long term cost, improves resilience and accelerates delivery. Enterprise architecture establishes: 

• Cloud landing zones 
• Identity and access management 
• Networking and security models 
• Platform engineering standards 
• Data and integration architecture. 

Cloud providers such as the AWS Well Architected Framework outline best practices that support this approach to achieve secure, efficient and reliable cloud environments. 

4. Strategic alignment to business priorities

Enterprise architecture ensures cloud migration is linked to business priorities, including: 

• Resilience 
• Cost optimisation 
• Customer experience 
• Regulatory compliance 
• Agility and innovation 
• Sustainability targets. 

This turns migration into a strategic programme, not just a technical activity.

5. Strong governance and decision-making 

Enterprise architecture establishes guardrails that: 

• Remove duplication 
• Enforce tagging and cost allocation 
• Standardise cloud patterns 
• Improve design quality 
• Ensure compliance with organisation wide standards. 

Frameworks like the Open Group’s TOGAF standard support consistent enterprise architecture governance across the organisation. 

6. Better risk management and security

Enterprise architects plan for: 

• Secure landing zones 
• Identity and access control 
• Encryption and data residency 
• Compliance requirements 
• Resilience and disaster recovery. 

Guidance such as the NCSC cloud security collection strengthens these architectural decisions and helps organisations adopt secure cloud services. 

7. Cost control and value realisation

Enterprise architecture is crucial for cloud cost optimisation because it defines efficient architectures that avoid waste. It supports: 

• Rightsizing decisions 
• Refactoring choices 
• Lifecycle governance 
• FinOps alignment 
• Workload placement strategies. 

This ensures cloud spend remains predictable and aligned with business value. 

Key enterprise architecture practices that accelerate migration

1. Portfolio assessment and rationalisation

Enterprise architecture evaluates: 

• Application value 
• Lifecycle stage 
• Fitness for cloud 
• Risk and complexity 
• Technical debt. 

This prevents migrating applications that should be modernised, consolidated or retired instead. 

2. Cloud readiness assessments

Readiness assessments evaluate: 

• Code quality 
• Performance and scalability needs 
• Security posture 
• Compliance requirements 
• Integration and data dependencies. 

These insights inform accurate migration strategies and help teams choose the right approach. 

3. Target state cloud architecture

Enterprise architecture defines the target state, including: 

• Cloud landing zones 
• Identity, access and network architecture 
• Platform engineering 
• Observability and logging 
• CI/CD pipelines 
• Automation standards. 

This ensures consistency across all migration waves. 

4. Business capability alignment

By mapping applications to business capabilities, enterprise architecture ensures migration aligns with organisational goals and modernises the areas that deliver the most value. 

5. Modern data and integration architecture

Cloud migration requires robust integration design. Enterprise architecture helps define: 

• API-first approaches 
• Event-driven architecture 
• Hybrid integration 
• Data pipelines 
• Governance and lineage. 

The Google Cloud Architecture Framework offers structured guidance that supports these principles. 

6. Phased migration wave planning

Enterprise architecture supports incremental migration by planning: 

• Migration waves 
• Dependency sequencing 
• Testing and validation 
• Operational readiness 
• Change management. 

This reduces risk and improves delivery speed. 

How enterprise architecture reduces cloud migration risks

Enterprise architecture enables organisations to avoid common cloud migration risks, such as: 

• Downtime, through dependency and impact analysis 
• Security gaps, by defining robust access and identity models 
• Cost overruns, by aligning with FinOps and workload sizing 
• Architecture drift, through strong governance 
• Integration failures, through complete visibility of data and interfaces 
• Scope creep, through clear migration sequencing. 

The UK government’s cloud guidance reinforces this structured, architecture-led approach for public sector organisations. 

Enterprise architecture and cost optimisation

Enterprise architecture helps organisations reduce cloud costs through: 

• Designing efficient cloud architectures 
• Choosing the right migration pattern 
• Removing technical debt 
• Preventing duplication across teams 
• Optimising data and storage strategies 
• Enforcing tagging and lifecycle policies 
• Supporting FinOps capabilities. 

Without enterprise architecture, cloud environments often become fragmented, expensive and difficult to manage. 

Enterprise architecture and AI-ready cloud platforms

AI adoption adds new complexity to cloud estates. Enterprise architecture ensures cloud platforms are AI-ready by defining: 

• Scalable GPU architectures 
• Cost efficient AI training environments 
• Data governance and lineage 
• Vector database integration 
• Secure access patterns 
• Hybrid data strategies. 

This ensures AI is adopted safely, efficiently and sustainably. 

How CACI supports enterprise architecture for cloud migration

CACI delivers robust enterprise architecture and cloud engineering services that accelerate migration while reducing risk, cost and complexity. 

Contact us today to learn more about how our structured architectural approach can help improve your migration quality, accelerate delivery and ensure your cloud investments generate measurable business value.