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Data centre migration risk checklist
Thirty questions we would ask on site before recommending a move. No form, no email address, nothing to download. Work through them and you will know how ready you actually are.
If you can answer all thirty, you probably do not need us. If you cannot answer half of them, you have just found where the risk is.
Tick the questions you can answer today with documentation rather than from memory. “Someone here would know” counts as a no, because on the night of a move that person is asleep or on leave.
The estate you actually have
Almost every audit finds equipment nobody could account for. These are the questions that surface it.
01
Do you have an asset register that was reconciled against the physical racks in the last twelve months?Not a procurement list. A register someone walked the room with.
02
Can you produce accurate rack elevations for every cabinet, as installed rather than as designed?
03
Do you know which devices are still in production service and which are powered on out of habit?
04
Is every device labelled in a way that matches the register, at both ends of every cable?
05
Do you know the serial numbers of the equipment being moved, and who holds the support contracts?
06
Have you identified equipment that is out of support, out of warranty, or past the point of being worth moving?
Dependencies
This is where migrations fail. Not in the truck, in the thing nobody knew depended on the thing that moved.
07
Do you have a current dependency map showing which services depend on which physical hosts?
08
Do you know what talks to what across sites, including anything a third party depends on?
09
Are there hard-coded IP addresses, licence servers tied to MAC addresses, or hostnames baked into applications?These are the ones that surface at 3am.
10
Do you know which services have a single point of failure today, before you add a move to them?
11
Has anyone confirmed what happens to your backup and replication during the move window?
Power, cooling and the physical destination
A move is only as real as the readiness of the room you are moving into.
12
Do you know your actual power draw per cabinet, measured rather than calculated from nameplate ratings?
13
Does the destination have the circuit capacity, phase balance and redundancy your load needs?
14
Is there cooling capacity at the destination for the load you are bringing, at the density you are bringing it?
15
Is containment, cable management and patching installed at the destination, or still to be built?
16
Have floor loading and seismic restraint been confirmed for the destination racks?In New Zealand this is not optional, and it is regularly discovered late.
17
Do you know the access route, lift capacity and door dimensions at both ends, measured?
Network and carriers
Connectivity lead times are the most common cause of a migration date slipping, and the least controllable.
18
Have cross-connects, circuits and carrier services been ordered for the destination?Lead times in New Zealand can run to weeks or months. This is usually the critical path.
19
Do you know which IP ranges move with you and which are provider-assigned and will change?
20
Has DNS been reviewed, including TTL values, ahead of the cutover?
21
Is there a plan for connectivity between the two sites during a phased move?
22
Have firewall rules, VPNs and any IP allowlisting held by third parties been identified?
Outage, sequencing and rollback
The plan is not a plan until it says what happens when a step fails.
23
Do you know the outage tolerance of each service, agreed with the business rather than assumed by IT?
24
Is there a written runbook with the order of operations, owners, dependencies and sign-off gates?
25
Is there a rollback position for each gate, and a point of no return that everyone has agreed?
26
Has the move window been checked against business events, month end, trading peaks and public holidays?
27
Do you know who has authority to call a stop during the window, and how they are contacted?
Commercial, lease and compliance
The half that is not technical, and the half that generates the surprise invoices.
28
Do you know your lease end date, notice period and exactly what make-good requires?Racks, cabling, containment and penetrations usually all have to come out.
29
Is insurance confirmed in writing for the equipment in transit, and for whose liability it is at each stage?
30
Do you have a documented plan for data destruction on anything being retired or disposed of?
Reading your score
- 25 to 30 yes. You are in good shape. Your gaps are probably specific rather than structural, and a short engagement to close them may be all you need.
- 15 to 24 yes. Normal, and workable. The missing answers are usually dependencies and destination readiness, which are exactly the ones that move dates.
- Under 15 yes. Do not set a move date yet. An audit and a dependency map come first, or the date will move for you and it will cost more than doing the work up front.
Any question you answered no to is a line in a risk register. Whether you engage us or not, write them down and cost them before committing to a window.
Too many blanks?
Our migration strategy assessment turns this checklist into an audit, a costed risk register and a plan. Paid, independent, and credited against the move if you proceed.
Migration strategy and site assessment