Since every organization is different, each organization’s migration to the public cloud warrants a custom approach. This allows for minimized costs and disruptions to existing operations while maximizing uptime and the transformative capabilities of the cloud.
Below, we’ll discuss the steps to create a successful AWS cloud transformation before, during, and after your migration:
Prior to your migration, there are a number of steps you’ll want to take to ensure your transformation is as smooth as possible.
Understanding your organization, business drivers, and application portfolio are essential for building a business case to move to AWS.
Areas you want to analyze may include:
By knowing how these factors play a role in your cloud migration, you can include them in your project plan to account for them ahead of time.
By working with a trusted partner, many can help fill in internal knowledge gaps and provide sound advice when designing and deploying applications that will thrive on AWS.
In addition, we’ve found that often many organizations benefit from having an internal team lead the AWS migration. Often, this is a small team with knowledge about the transformation.
This can allow your other employees to have a designated person to talk to for issues and questions. They can also give other employees confidence in the migration as they will be able to provide information about the process.
Developing a critical mass of people who share the desire to evolve on AWS and building a culture of innovation and over-communication ensures a strong use of AWS and smoother transition.
This transition can be made smoother by having all of your employees on the same page, particularly in regards to budgets, timelines, and other relevant processes.
Once your needs have been assessed, it’s important to create a migration strategy for each application. When it comes to application design, there are typically five ways to change the application:
While designing your project plan, your organizational and application needs will determine which of these is the most effective migration plan.
In order to successfully implement and optimize your applications, these steps are necessary for your project plan.
First, is the actual migration. There are a number of tools available to assist in your organization’s migration to the AWS cloud, including:
Each of these tools has the ability to make seamless transitions for both one-time migrations and ongoing transfers of data for hybrid environments.
Next, once your migration is complete, it’s important to continuously monitor your environment for optimization opportunities. Areas examined often include:
By monitoring your environment, you can ensure that your organization is getting the most out of the migration to the AWS cloud.
Another aspect of your migration is ensuring that everyone in your organization is well-versed in the AWS platform. You want this migration to benefit everyone, so it’s often important to pair it with training and AWS certifications.
As discussed in the ARM Strategy for Optimized AWS Migration whitepaper, an AWS migration is an opportunity for renewal.
This transformation allows your organization to examine current applications, move them to a more efficient environment, and then optimize your workloads to ensure everyone in your organization is seeing the benefits of this move.
Download the AWS Migration whitepaper to see how you can help migrate your organization!