Know Before You Go: The Importance of Discovery for Your Cloud Migration

May 11, 2021

It sounds obvious: You can’t begin a journey if you don’t know where you’re starting from. But when it comes to the cloud migration process, that’s exactly what many organizations do. To prevent getting lost in the woods, adding a “discovery” phase before you start your migration is a critical planning step.

During discovery, the mission is simple: collect data on your organization’s technical assets to provide you with a clearer understanding of your gaps and assets and – more importantly – an idea of where you want to go. But while the mission is straightforward, getting a comprehensive picture of all your technical assets can be time-consuming work. That’s why Enquizit embraces automation to streamline the discovery process, saving your team time and money. To help you understand this pivotal stage of cloud migration, we’re diving deep into discovery: what it entails, what it can provide your organization, and how it fits into your cloud migration journey.

Optimizing for the Path Ahead

To work efficiently, you need to know what every machine on your network is doing, and why it’s doing it. Optimization is a primary driver to the cloud for many of our clients. They also know it takes a substantial number of staff hours to map every single machine in your organization – but that’s what it takes to truly optimize your migration. With automated discovery, we can take a thorough inventory of your current system, faster, without taking your team away from daily responsibilities.

Discovery might seem easy – we all think we know what’s going on in our own networks. But our discovery reports often reveal the potential for huge cost-savings. After discovery, many of our clients retire 10-20% of the machines they are currently running – and that’s money saved before migration even begins. Discovery can also give your organization a much clearer picture of the overall cost to operate in the cloud, so you can start planning for a more efficient future.

But just because our discovery process is automated doesn’t mean we just flip a switch and wait for the numbers to roll in. For discovery to be effective, you also need to understand what those numbers mean – and where they can take you.

4 Stages of Discovery

At Enquizit, our discovery process is unique because we couple the efficiency of automation with our deep knowledge of the many pathways to migration. Here’s what that discovery phase looks like in practice:

1. Understanding Policies
   Before data collection begins, our team works with your network and security groups to better understand your policies and data sharing limitations. We spend time addressing all security concerns, so your team can feel confident that your data is safe.

2. Data Collection
   After safety procedures are in place, we deploy sensors into your system to collect as much data as possible. These sensors examine resource utilization, connections between machines, and the state of your hardware and software to identify the optimal migration path for your current infrastructure.

3. Data Sharing
   After our sensors have collected as much data as possible, we generate a report that provides a snapshot of your current state. This is the blueprint that is then used to start planning your migration.

4. Filling in the Gaps
   While automated discovery provides the raw data we need to create a blueprint, only people on your team can tell us about periods of high demand, future plans and what your customers or employees need to thrive during and after migration. That’s why our final step is to review the data report with your team, filling in any missing gaps or questions to get the complete picture.

Bridging the Gap

We often underestimate the value of knowing exactly where we’re at, but this is critical data if we want to move toward optimization. Adding the discovery phase – bolstered with automation – makes it easy for your team bridge the gap between your current system and your goals, so you get the most out of your cloud migration.

If you need support during your cloud migration, talk to the Enquizit team. We have years of expertise working with a wide variety of organizations and can help you streamline and simplify your migration journey to maximize results.

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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.

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