When a financial services team decides to move data to the cloud, the conversation usually starts with infrastructure. Which cloud provider. What the cost model looks like. Whether to go lift-and-shift or re-architect from the ground up. Those are real decisions. But they are not the hard part. The hard part is walking into a room with your compliance team six months into the migration and being able to answer two questions: Where did this data come from? And how do we prove it? If you cannot answer both of those confidently, your migration is not done. It might not even be safe. This post is about what it actually takes to migrate financial data to the cloud while keeping data lineage intact and regulators on your side. Not the theory. The decisions. Why Financial Data Migration Is a Different Problem Most cloud migration guides treat data as a technical artifact. Move it, validate it, retire the source. Done. Financial data does not work that way. In a regulated environment, data carries obligation.…