Are You Ready to Migrate? The 7 Steps of a Cloud-Readiness Assessment
Apr 26, 2021
Most migration-minded organizations have an idea of where they want the AWS Cloud to take them. They want to take advantage of long-term cost savings, support a growing remote workforce, or improve security. But that ideal is only one side of the story – before you migrate, you also need to know where you are now.
A migration assessment allows your team to do a gap analysis before you migrate, so you can understand if you’re ready to get started and – if not – what’s holding you back. What does a thorough migration assessment look like? Follow along to find out.
1. Executive Approval
Do you have buy-in from your leadership? Before you start migrating, you need to know that top-level decision-makers at your organization are on board. Identify the key stakeholders spearheading this effort and ensure they have a say in how the migration unfolds. If you start planning before your team has agreed, you might find yourself fighting tooth and nail through the entire migration process.
2. Discovery
You may think you have a firm grasp of your technical inventory, but many teams don’t realize how much of their infrastructure is always on, flying under the radar. During the Discovery phase, cloud-assessment software analyzes all your technical assets to determine which servers are needed, which can be retired, and what you need in terms of processing power and storage to be right-sized for the cloud.
3. Planning
In the planning phase, the focus moves to broad migration planning, which starts with determining where your organization is headed, with or without the cloud. During the planning phase, your team looks at the big picture – what do you want to upgrade, replace, or retire in the next 18 months? How do you currently manage projects, and what needs to change? How are you using and storing data, and what are your limitations and compliance needs? After determining your goals, you can then use the cloud to supercharge all of those efforts.
4. Framing Your Cloud Infrastructure
Next, it’s time to establish the “rules of the road” for your new AWS Cloud environment. In this step, you set up permissions and design a framework that determines how systems will connect, which machines talk to each other, and how vendors and outside organizations can interact with your cloud system. In this stage, the focus is on logistics and compliance, including setting up logging, defining how new departments will join the cloud, and more.
5. Operations
After you’ve created a framework, it’s time to think about day-to-day operations. To do this, you’ll focus on defining your current processes around maintenance, patching, business continuity, and disaster recovery. You’ll also determine if your current operations procedures will work in the new AWS Cloud environment. In this phase you can also start thinking about scaling – how do you currently scale your infrastructure (in terms of compute, storage, etc.), and how will that change in the cloud?
6. People & Cloud Skills
People are the foundation of your company and moving to the cloud means investing in your team’s knowledge. In this phase of the assessment, you need to establish what skills your team already has and determine any gaps in their skillset that need to be addressed before launch. Employees might be wary of migration at first – during this phase, be transparent and ask them what they need to succeed. Reassuring your team that they will be supported and trained in cloud migration along the way will help them feel more empowered and collaborative in the process.
7. Security
How up to speed is your security today, and where do you need to be? In the final stage of the assessment, your company should take a close look at your current security protocols, regulations, and compliance standards, and make a plan to implement them in your cloud environment. Because compliance and security is baked into the AWS cloud, many teams are surprised at how easy it becomes to manage security in the cloud, freeing up team hours. However, it’s important to plan your security ahead of time so that relevant compliance and other needs are layered in as your plan is created.
The Sky Is the Limit
Conducting a migration assessment is about more than just planning. It’s an opportunity to break out of the cages instilled by your on-premises architecture and show your team what is possible when you move to the cloud. With a complete migration assessment, you can map out where you are now and where you want to be, and discover how the AWS Cloud can help you bridge that gap.
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Learn more:
If you are considering migration and want to determine your cloud readiness, Enquizit can help. Enquizit’s custom cloud assessments are backed by years of experience helping organizations migrate to the AWS Cloud.
For more information, go to: Cloud Transformation
Asim Iqbal
Asim is Enquizit’s CTO and a member of the founding team. He has been an SME on security, storage, and resilience as well as Enquizit’s Lead Architect and VP of Solution Architecture. Among his professional endeavors is the implementation of a weather modeling HPC setup for Environment Canada, storage design and implementation for the Canadian National Institute for the Blind’s library, Media ingestion, encryption, and transcoding architecture for Bell Satellite TV, Cloud infrastructure, resilience, and security architecture and implementation for The Common Application and complete migration of Harvard Business Review’s Primary and DR data center to AWS. He maintains a strong personal interest in frictionless technical designs focused on end-user happiness and employee satisfaction, still thinks that ‘Data Availability Architect’ (from his early days working with HPE) is the coolest certification title ever and is an ex-CISSP. He neither confirms nor denies his purported afflictions with coffee, slow travel, and cats with unbridled spirits.
