Compliance-Centric Database Refactoring for Government Cloud Migration into AWS RDS Environments

Government agencies are moving legacy databases to cloud platforms to improve scalability and continuity, but this shift must also preserve compliance, auditability, and control over sensitive public data. In AWS RDS migration, this becomes difficult when old database structures carry weak access definitions, incomplete audit traces, and mixed-sensitivity schema design into the target environment. Existing studies discuss cloud migration, public-sector governance, database modernization, and refactoring, but they do not clearly explain how database refactoring can be used as a compliance preparation layer before government migration into AWS RDS. This article addresses that gap through a compliance-centric refactoring framework that combines schema restructuring, access policy normalization, audit trace improvement, rule-based compliance mapping, and controlled migration validation. Using a results-based simulation design, the study evaluates compliance alignment, audit completeness, privilege reduction, validation pass rate, migration consistency, and compliance violation reduction across legacy and refactored workflows. The results show that the refactored workflow provides stronger compliance readiness, better audit support, fewer violations, and more stable migration behavior than the legacy workflow. The study concludes that compliance-centric refactoring is a practical preparation step for safer and more governable government cloud migration.