The demands on your digital experience platform have never been greater.
If your organization is running an older version of Adobe Experience Manager (AEM), whether on-premise or via managed services, you’re likely grappling with slow deployment cycles, massive operational overhead, and security risks. These hidden costs erode the ROI you expect from your digital experience cost center.
For CIOs and CMOs, the question is no longer if it’s time to adopt the AEM cloud model, but when and how. The migration to cloud services is not a technical chore. It’s a strategic pivot toward continuous agility.
The Migration Imperative: Why Move to AEM as a Cloud Service?
The decision to initiate an AEM migration is driven by three core business outcomes that legacy AEM deployments simply cannot deliver. This move ensures your platform aligns with the full scope of your enterprise digital transformation roadmap: people, process, technology, and data.
Eliminating Operational Debt and Cost
Older AEM infrastructures demand constant, specialized management. Security patching. Version upgrades. Infrastructure babysitting. This operational debt stifles innovation because your best people are keeping the lights on instead of building new capabilities.
OpEx efficiency and cost. The cloud model shifts infrastructure spending from high capital expenditure (CapEx) to predictable operational expenditure (OpEx), directly optimizing your Adobe Experience Cloud (AEC) cost structure. You stop buying servers three years in advance based on capacity guesses.
Zero downtime and agility. AEM Cloud Service automatically applies updates and patches without interrupting service. This eliminates manual weekend work and ensures your AEM services are always running the latest, most secure version. No more “please don’t launch campaigns this weekend, we’re patching.”
True elasticity. Cloud-native architecture provides genuine auto-scaling. It handles peak traffic dynamically (for both AEM Sites and AEM Assets), ensuring performance during campaigns while scaling down during slow periods. You only pay for what you actually use.
Maximizing Agility and Deployment Speed
Continuous delivery is impossible when every deployment requires manual governance. The Cloud Service architecture breaks this bottleneck.
Mandatory CI/CD. Built-in Continuous Integration and Continuous Delivery pipelines enforce standardized DevOps practices, drastically reducing deployment cycles from days to minutes. What used to take a change control board meeting now happens automatically.
Decoupled architecture. The system automatically separates the authoring and publishing environments, preventing heavy content creation tasks from ever impacting live site performance. Your content team can’t accidentally bring down the website by uploading 500 high-resolution images.
Faster innovation. Development teams are freed from managing servers and infrastructure, allowing them to dedicate their time entirely to creating customer-facing features. Less time in ops meetings, more time writing code that matters.
How to Execute a Cloud Service Migration
The successful journey to AEM as a Cloud Service requires diligent planning. Adobe’s approach focuses on assessment, automated tooling, and refactoring the codebase for the cloud-native environment.
The following roadmap outlines the technical stages necessary for a smooth cloud service migration:
| Phase | Core Objective | Key Activities |
| I. Readiness & Assessment | Define scope, measure technical complexity, and prepare the code environment | Run the Cloud Manager Code Quality Scan to identify potential issues and necessary code modernization. Document asset inventory and content structure. |
| II. Refactoring & Implementation | Modernize the codebase and integrate AEM with your wider digital ecosystem | Remove custom code incompatible with the cloud service. Refactor components using modern Core Components. Migrate content using the Content Transfer Tool (CTT). |
| III. Testing & Go-Live | Validate performance, resolve final issues, and execute the final switch | Complete rigorous user acceptance testing (UAT). Perform performance and load testing against cloud targets. Implement the final cut-over. |
Phase I: Readiness and Assessment
This is where most organizations discover uncomfortable truths about their current implementation.
The Cloud Manager Code Quality Scan will flag every custom hack, every workaround, every “we’ll fix that later” decision from the past five years. Good. Better to know now than after you’ve started the migration.
Document your asset inventory carefully. How many digital assets do you actually have? Where are they? Who owns them? Most organizations don’t have clear answers, which makes content transfer estimates wildly optimistic.
Phase II: Refactoring and Implementation
This phase separates organizations that succeed from those that struggle.
Remove incompatible custom code. If your developers built custom workflows that directly access the JCR repository in ways the cloud service doesn’t allow, those have to be rewritten. Not refactored. Rewritten. This takes time and budget.
Refactor components. Use modern AEM Core Components instead of maintaining your legacy custom component library. Yes, this means letting go of components your team built years ago. They’re technical debt now.
Migrate content strategically. The Content Transfer Tool handles the heavy lifting, but you need to decide what actually needs to migrate. Do you really need content from 2015? Probably not.
Phase III: Testing and Go-Live
User acceptance testing in the cloud environment is non-negotiable. What worked perfectly on your on-premise infrastructure might behave differently in the cloud.
Performance and load testing must happen against realistic scenarios. If your biggest campaign day sees 10 times the regular traffic, test for 15 times the normal traffic. Give yourself headroom.
The final cut-over should be boring. If it’s exciting, something went wrong in planning.
What Happens After Migration
Here’s what catches people off guard: the migration isn’t the hard part. Changing how your organization operates is.
You now have a platform that can deploy multiple times per day. Does your governance structure support that? Do your content teams know how to work in a continuous delivery model? Can your marketing stakeholders approve changes faster?
The technology’s ready. Is your organization?
Mastering Continuous Experience
The shift to AEM as a Cloud Service is fundamental. It transforms your platform from a static investment into a dynamic, continuously optimizing service. It resolves the core enterprise tension between managing obsolete technology and delivering continuous innovation.
But let’s be realistic about what this requires. You need executive sponsorship. You need dedicated migration resources, not just people doing this in addition to their day jobs. You need a budget for both the migration itself and the organizational change management that must happen alongside it.
By planning strategically, adopting the right tools, and approaching the migration to cloud services not as an upgrade but as a strategic business initiative, you ensure your platform accelerates your business rather than holding it back.
The companies that succeed treat this as a business transformation with technical components, not a technical project with business implications. That distinction matters more than you’d think.
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