What determines the success of migration? The regional threat environment makes this question even more relevant. During H1 2026, organisations in the UAE tackled an average of 2,197 cyberattacks per company every week, with the monthly average remaining above 2,100 attacks for five to six months. Meanwhile, at the wider Middle East and Africa level, ZeroFox recorded at least 209 cyber threat incidents in Q1 2026, which is nearly 64 per cent more than the same period last year. Ransomware and digital extortion accounted for around 46 per cent of observed incidents.
Against this backdrop, the speed of such migrations does not always translate into its success. When organisations change hypervisors, consolidate data-centre infrastructure or shift workload between private and public cloud environments, they are changing the foundations on which critical applications operate. A transition may finish on scheduled timelines, but if it fails to meet recovery, security visibility or business continuity conditions, it means the organisation has not achieved successful modernisation.
Migration also creates temporary risk windows. For instance, during migration, an organisation may operate old and new environments simultaneously and workloads will be replicated, administrator permissions may increase, network relationships may change and applications can become dependent on systems spread across multiple systems. This makes workload discovery, dependency mapping, access control, segmentation and security monitoring essential before the first critical workload moves, rather than controls to be added after migration.
According to Verizon’s 2026 Data Breach Investigations Report, software vulnerability exploitation was the leading initial access route at 31 per cent of breaches. This threat landscape further underscores why such controls should be among initial procedures of workload migration. Organisations should consider the security of both the existing and destination environments, and the connections between them, must remain part of the migration plan from the outset.
How licensing and platform changes accelerates infrastructure migration?
Licensing changes do not always make headlines, yet when Microsoft confirmed it is retiring the licence-included version of Azure VMware Solution, it ignited conversations around migration costs, operational complexity and potential risks.
For organisations using the affected AVS bundle, the deadlines are now raising concerns. License-included Pay-As-You-Go deployments must have transitioned to portable VMware Cloud Foundation (VCF) licensing by October 31, 2026, while customers with eligible license-included Reserved Instances have until August 2027 to transition to VCF Bring Your Own License (BYOL) or move their workloads elsewhere.
This change is providing a timely example of how licensing and platform changes can accelerate infrastructure decisions. The Azure VMware Solution has long been a preferred option for companies that seek flexibility of the public cloud without rebuilding their VMware environment from scratch. As the licensing model changes, organisations look for options to migrate workload. However, the real question is whether they can make that transition without introducing new operational and cyber risks.
Backup availability doesn’t guarantee business recovery?
When the threat landscape becomes more challenging, organisations respond to it by strengthening their backup policies. But the real question is, does that guarantee recoverability? Veeam’s 2026 Data Trust and Resilience Report found that among organisations affected by ransomware, only 28 per cent fully recovered all affected data, while 44 per cent recovered less than three-quarters. This data shows how organisations can struggle in restoring critical services within the time the business requires, even after securing their operations with strong back policies.
The report also found that while 90 per cent of organisations were confident they could recover within their defined recovery-time objectives, only 69 per cent said those objectives fully aligned with business-continuity requirements. This gap further highlights the need to have migration-tested recovery rather than assumed recovery.
Are advanced migration tools the real solution?
While the discussions around how cyber perpetrators exploit phased migrations, modern migration tools are considered an answer to it, which can minimise downtime and automate the transition. But reducing migration downtime solves only one part of the problem. A workload arriving successfully at its destination does not confirm that dependencies have been preserved, backups are clean, security controls are correctly configured, or the organisation can recover the service after ransomware, corruption or a failed cutover. Technical migration capability and business recoverability are two different aspects.
Therefore, recovery has to be designed before the proposed transition period. Organisations should be able to classify workloads by business criticality, map application dependencies, define realistic RTOs and RPOs, establish rollback criteria, protect recovery copies from the production environment and test restoration before decommissioning the existing platform. Similarly, the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency (CISA) recommends maintaining offline, encrypted backups, regularly testing their integrity and availability, understanding dependencies between critical systems and prioritising restoration as per the importance of the business.
The current infrastructure landscape offers enterprises an opportunity to rethink beyond licensing or technology architecture, to evaluate if their existing virtualisation strategy guarantees the required resilience, effortless, recovery capabilities and future-ready solution. Licensing changes open doors to wider possibilities for businesses to build a long-term strategy. Amid these shifts, organisations that are best prepared for the next phase of infrastructure modernisation are not those that migrate faster. They will be those that understand what they are moving, what could fail, what must remain operational and how quickly they can recover when something goes wrong.
