How do you execute a cloud migration project?

The assess stage of your migration is effectively a data gathering exercise. You will need to establish a baseline of what your environment looks like on-premise and how this could be projected to run in the cloud with associated cost-modeling using data analysis.  Successful discovery provides in-depth analysis of what servers you have, how many, and the apps you use.  This analysis is helpful to speed up your journey to a successful digital transformation onto a cloud platform. As a part of this assessment you will need to perform an inventory discovery, and use time-series performance data to allow you to right-size compute, storage and databases resources in the cloud. This can be used to help project costs following your migration.

Must follow a structured and iterative process that involves assessing your current state, planning, preparation, testing, migration, and launch. Before migrating, understand the current IT environment, and identify goals and cloud requirements. Conduct an inventory of your data, applications, and infrastructure and evaluate their performance, dependencies, security, and compliance. Follow a structured and iterative process that involves testing, validating, and monitoring each workload before and after the migration. Always use the tools to automate and streamline the migration process. #CloudMigration #CloudComputing #DomainExpertise

I'll be the contrarian here: this sounds anti-Lean/anti-Agile and I don't like it. These types of mass inventories and waterfall plans could take months to years and in that time your competitor is beating you by that much more. Take a more iterative/MVP approach and give your teams leeway to test cloud migrations and workloads, otherwise you may find yourself in a situation where you're repatriating workloads download the line. The ideal outcome may be more of a Hybrid model!

- You need to know a list of applications, their severity (high, medium, low), whether they can be moved to the Cloud as-is, or if they require relocation (lift and shift), rehosting, replatforming, refactoring, repurchasing, retaining, or retiring. You must also be aware of existing bugs, dependencies, application stack, and complexities that you don't want to carry over as-is when migrating to the Cloud. - Before planning to migrate to the Cloud, it's crucial to have the Chief Information Security Officer (CISO), Cloud Center of Excellence (CCOE), Application, and Infrastructure teams aligned with a RACI matrix that specifies who is responsible, accountable, consulted, and informed for all activities during the Cloud migration.

Before embarking on a migration journey, it's essential to gain a comprehensive understanding of your existing IT environment. Identify your objectives and prerequisites for transitioning to the cloud. Begin by conducting an exhaustive inventory of your data, applications, and infrastructure. Assess their performance, interdependencies, security parameters, and compliance requirements. Additionally, perform a thorough cost-benefit analysis to evaluate the financial implications, potential risks, and anticipated benefits associated with cloud migration.

A cloud migration project requires careful planning and a thorough understanding of your organization's objectives and goals. By evaluating your current infrastructure and applications and prioritizing those that can be migrated. Determine the best cloud service provider and deployment methodology, then create a detailed migration plan with a timeframe. Make sure your team is well-trained, and run thorough tests to ensure functionality in the cloud environment. Consider gradual migration strategies to reduce disruptions while maintaining open communication and monitoring for issue resolution. Because each organization's migration path is unique, consistently improve your cloud infrastructure for performance and cost benefits after transfer.

I would recommend designing a sandbox/testing area first to monitor your app’s post-cloud migration performance. If it differs from its normal on-premises (data center) performance, you can document and correct it before migrating your entire environment. The sandbox/testing strategy saves your company time and money.

When executing a cloud migration project and designing a cloud architecture require collaboration among various stakeholders, including IT teams, management, and cloud service providers. It's also essential to continuously assess and refine your cloud strategy as your organization's needs and the cloud technology landscape evolve.

I would recommend first migrating non-critical apps first. Non-critical apps aren’t essential towards business operations. If they go down, your firm will continue to operate. Any critical production should be last. If something goes wrong with these critical apps then your firm’s profits could be at stake. I would also recommend checking to see if there are any government or industry regulations preventing you from storing some of your files in the cloud. Finally, I would draft an audit strategy with storage classes and data retrieval times just in case some of the cloud files are part of an audit.

A few additional considerations. First, make sure to have a rollback plan in place in case any unexpected issues arise during the migration. This ensures that you can quickly revert to the previous state if needed. Second, optimize your resources in the cloud. This means fine-tuning configurations, right-sizing instances, and implementing cost-control strategies to avoid unnecessary expenses. Lastly, don't forget about data security. Ensure that your data is protected during transit and at rest, and implement access controls and encryption as needed. These additional steps, combined with the core execution process, help to make the cloud migration as smooth and secure as possible.

The discussion around optimization and security in the cloud should start during the planning phase, not after you've migrated your infrastructure. Set yourself up for success by building out a governance and finops framework to guide your migration, not to optimize post migration. • Setup automatic tagging of resources to identify business ownership, classification, environment, sensitivity of data, etc • Build out departments and assign billing based on tagged resources so each team knows exactly how much their infrastructure costs • Set budgets and alerting to know when over-spending is imminent • Utilize resources like Azure Advisor to help recognize cost savings via savings plans, reserved instances, etc

Cloud security must be the foundation of your cloud migration strategy. If you can’t protect your cloud assets then don’t pursue a cloud strategy. Employ a zero-trust strategy. These are the 3 principles: 1) verify explicitly; 2) assume breach and 3) use least-privilege access. Using zero-trust would keep you alert of any potential cyberattacks. Finally, check out your provider’s shared responsibility model. This model shows your responsibilities are regarding cloud maintenance. Usually, companies are responsible for what’s in the cloud (files, apps, virtual machines). The cloud providers are responsible for what’s ‘of the cloud’ like servers, uptime, data centers, etc.

Approach your migration as a 3-stage process 1. Assess  2. Mobilize 3. Migrate & Modernize Assess: Focuses on understanding your current environment to determine how prepared your IT infrastructure is to move to the cloud.  This will help you to formulate the goals and objectives of your migration. Mobilize: Has an emphasis on defining details of your migration plan/strategy, it will also help you to iron out kinks in your business plan with regards to the requirements of needing to perform specific migration strategies. Migrate and Modernize: Design your app/solution to run on the cloud, understand the services required, the interconnections between different services required when migrated, in addition to the validation of the design.

AWS's Migration Acceleration Program (MAP) offers a comprehensive approach to cloud migration. Starting with the Assess phase, organizations evaluate their IT landscape, pinpointing dependencies and application nuances. This sets a clear migration trajectory. The Mobilize phase focuses on crafting a detailed migration strategy, empowering teams, and addressing challenges. With a solid plan, the Migrate phase commences, transitioning applications to the cloud and optimizing for peak performance. AWS MAP emphasizes best practices throughout, ensuring migrations are streamlined, secure, and business-aligned.