Accelerate Cloud Migration with Wave Planning in Azure Migrate

ShubhamJain92

Microsoft

Nov 11, 2025

Streamline enterprise cloud adoption with structured waves in Azure Migrate

Introduction

Migrating to the cloud is more than a technical upgrade - it's a strategic leap toward agility, scalability, and innovation. Yet, for many organizations, the journey can feel overwhelming, with complex dependencies and business risks threatening to slow progress.

Today, we’re excited to announce the public preview of wave planning in Azure Migrate - a new capability designed to make large-scale migrations more manageable and predictable. With wave planning, you can now organize your migration journey into logical, iterative waves, enabling your teams to plan, execute, and track progress with greater speed, confidence, and control.

Key Benefits:

Accelerate migrations: Quickly identify and prioritize “quick win” workloads and applications by surfacing relevant information from discovery and assessments.
Reduced risks: Group systems that work together using application grouping, dependency analysis and tags allowing safer iterative planning.
Increased predictability: Visualize migration progress and timelines centrally, enabling continuous feedback and proactive adjustments.
Application-centric migrations and modernization: Plan, execute, and track every step at the application level for greater control and business alignment.

Wave Planning in Azure Migrate

Concepts and Stages

Planning Stage

During the planning stage, you can organize their applications and workloads into waves and determine the order in which these groups will be migrated. By doing so, you can establish a comprehensive plan that outlines the specific steps, timelines, and resources required for each wave, ensuring a structured and efficient approach to migration and modernization.

Key aspects of the wave planning in this stage includes:

Group and sequence applications and workloads using tags, dependency analysis, and workload data.
Set Azure targets and migration tools based on Azure Migrate assessment recommendations.
Outline planning steps, timelines, and create a wave plan for application migration and modernization.

Execution Stage

Using wave planning you can perform the migration and modernization activities of the application withing the wave, as per the plan and track the progress as workloads are moved, tested, and migrated / modernized in Azure.

Key aspects of wave planning at this stage includes:

Centrally track migration and modernization activities for all applications and workloads within the wave. You can start migrating servers and databases using Server migration and Azure database Migration Service using in-product integrations.
Integrated end-to-end workflows to facilitate server migrations from on-premises environments and various public clouds to Azure Virtual Machines.
Monitor and visualize wave timelines in relation to planned migration and modernization dates and implement corrective actions as required based on status updates.

In a nutshell, wave planning transforms migration from a one-time event into a continuous journey of improvement. By iterating, learning, and adapting, organizations build institutional knowledge, reduce risk, and unlock the full benefits of cloud adoption.