The number of organisations migrating from on-premise data centres to the cloud is accelerating at a rapid pace; this has grown significantly during the last 12 months as companies look to mitigate risk during the pandemic and enable rapid scaling of infrastructure.
SQA Consulting are often engaged by organisations that have been running unsuccessful cloud migration projects for months if not years, and this is typically caused by a failure in the strategy and planning phase.
A clearly defined migration strategy is critical for success otherwise you will fail before getting out the blocks; here are some key points to consider when defining the correct approach for your business;
Organisations need to plan and conduct a cloud migration with an organised and methodical approach. Do not fall foul of thinking you can simply ship your data and services to a public cloud provider, and that everything will work out fine. SQA Consulting have been bought in by numerous companies who have tried this approach and have quickly found that the planned efficiency and cost savings initiative has become a massive challenge, as timelines slip out and costs escalate due to the unforeseen service utilisation, as they have moved to a consumption-based subscription model.
All cloud providers have developed models for managing the cloud migration process. SQA Consulting is provider agnostic, however in this article, we focus on the AWS approach.
Amazon Web Services (AWS) provide some tried and tested tools for helping organisations tackle their service utilisation and consumption-based planning. Their Migration Readiness and Planning method is one of these.
At SQA Consulting we use this methodology to help organisations prepare for the journey ahead. We work closely with AWS during the planning phase to properly identify the right approach, tools, target architecture, and migration plan so that potential pitfalls are avoided further on down the road.
Let’s look at each of the phases that AWS draws attention to:
1. Assessing Migration Readiness
a. Here we look at the scope and initial business case of the migration; are these clearly defined? Have the applications and environments to be migrated been evaluated? Is the “landing zone” secure in context of the in-scope applications? Do the operations teams have the necessary skills in cloud technologies? Does the organisation have the experience necessary to move the technology stacks in scope?
2. Application Discovery
a. This is a critical step. Understanding the on-premise environments and the applications that are being hosted is a mandatory requirement for building the business case and planning the migrations. “You can’t migrate what you don’t know!”
3. Discovery Tools
a. Tooling can be used to help with application discovery. Various toolsets can provide automated inventory and application discovery, map dependencies between systems, capture OS versions, determine performance baselines, and help to categorise applications in a meaningful way.
4. Application Portfolio Analysis
a. Next, we take the information captured during application discovery and use this to create logical groupings of applications and services. This is used to quantify the migration size and strategy based on the grouping.
5. Migration Planning
a. The migration plan sets out the scope, schedule, resource plan, risks and issues. It also includes a communication plan. The migration plan takes into consideration crucial factors such as the migration order and what resources are needed.
6. Technical Planning
a. Planning migration waves helps to create a manageable iterative process. Using the portfolio analysis output assists in creating the backlog of tasks and in prioritising them accordingly. At this point, organisations may begin to size the migration teams required to consume the backlog so that migration waves are completed in short sprints avoiding long-running work packages, which tend to slow or limit migration progress.
7. The Virtual Private Cloud Environment
a. When creating the target cloud environment for the migration waves, three items need to be considered;
i. Security
ii. Operations
iii. Platform
Following the steps above, gives a structured and logical approach to planning cloud migrations.
It is important for organisations to consider the benefits of partnering with an organisation that completes migrations as part of its DNA such as SQA Consulting. There is a wealth of savings and time to be found when leveraging the knowledge of a cloud migration partner, be it credits from the cloud provider for using an approved partner or leveraging their experience to accelerate the migration and thus accelerating the delivery of benefits.
This article references the AWS Migration Whitepaper which can be found here.
For more information relating to how we can help you with your cloud migration and business transformation please contact;
Steve Ruston – Chief Transformation Officer – steve.ruston@sqa-consulting.com
