Cloud Migration Planning
Cloud migration has been the top 3 initiatives for companies going through digital transformation the last 5 years as the market expects companies to deliver value faster and faster. With technologies getting more advanced, companies can easily realize the benefits in months instead of waiting for quarters. Before getting started, it is beneficial to get your leadership team to sponsor the investment and buy-in from your teams. Make sure the culture encourages test and learn, fail fast, and people empowerment. With any migration, it's best to keep it as simple as possible. Here are the 4 phases for your consideration while doing cloud migration.
Phase I - Assessment
Discovery:
Project Kick-Off - Getting your IT, business, operations, and key stakeholders in one room to align on project goals and roles & responsibilities.
System Architecture - Capture as-is system topology & data end-points
Content, Workflow, Integration, Application, Security, Privacy & Compliance - capture key understanding of the business functionalities from existing systems documents and interacting with the workflows, applications, reports, tools to find insights & opportunities.
Identify and interview stakeholders - Take time to meet with the stakeholders (60 - 90 minutes meetings with each org) to understand current system opportunities, new add-value scenarios, and discuss potential challenges with the migration (compliance, system + people + process dependencies, schedule conflicts, resource limitations, data retention policy, etc.)
Data Collection -
Technical and Usage Audit and Analysis - Capture and analyze usage data to drive insights on what 30-40% of the functionalities, applications, tools and content to migrate. It's typical that the rest of 20% are used occasionally, and 40-50% might not be relevant after the migration.
Content, Workflow, Integration & Application Inventory Control – It is helpful to have an inventory of assets when recommending migration rationalization via ICE approach (integrate, consolidate, or eliminate).
Analysis -
*Analysis of all collected data - use below list to complete your analysis.
Transformation Assessment:
Transform (content, workflow, integration, application)
Architecture
Best Practices
Service Catalog
Infrastructure Assessment:
Compute
Storage
Network
Data Collection
Tools Analysis:
Storage and Automation Tools
Security & Risk Assessment
Availability
Identify & Access
User & Department Categorization
Diaster Recovery Process
Compliance
Cost & Benefit Assessment:
Tangible and intangible
*Initial findings documented - here's a good outline to leverage.
Executive summary
Disaster Recovery Process t scope and objectives
Assumptions and limitations of the assessment
Methods and tools used
Design of the current environment or systems with applicable diagrams
Security requirements
Summary of findings and recommendations
Report -
Present key findings - focus on people, process, and technology
Delivery of concrete and actionable recommendations
Phase II - Classify
All the contents, workloads, integrations, and applications of an organization may not be suitable and compliant for cloud migration. Based on the assessment report it is important to classify the contents, workloads, integrations, and applications as cloud compatible or non-compatible. Plan to prepare the classification report based on the analysis of various Cloud readiness parameters.
Phase III - Restructure
There may be a need to restructure the cloud compatible workloads, integrations and applications to make it cloud ready before any planning of migration. The following is a sample list of activities to consider for restructure.
Sharing Plan for Workload and Integration Migration (& Development)
Define Workflow
Development Application Readiness
Content Migration Inventory (& Archival Strategy)
Phase IV - Migrate
Based on the Assessment Report, recommended contents, workloads, integrations, applications will be planned to migrate to cloud. Initially low priority workloads and contents will be migrated and after the confirmation of stability and availability tests, the necessary workloads and integrations will be migrated to cloud environment. Determine migration schedules and project milestones to ensure content/workflow/integration/application are migrated to the cloud according to business needs, allowing for roll-out to end users that meets business targets.
If you're planning a migration or in-midst of transformation, we're happy to provide you with recommendations to get you on your way faster.
Most cloud migrations failed due to lack of leadership buy-ins, poor planning, overlooking opportunities to reimagine the future, not having stakeholders & end-users involved early and not following up post migration to take full advantage of the cloud.