The Definitive Cloud Migration Check List

Why is creating a cloud migration checklist important? The world is increasingly moving to the cloud. It is estimated that by 2025 the market size for cloud services providers will be close to 1 trillion dollars. Companies of all sizes are moving their legacy on-prem IT assets to AWS, Azure, and a myriad of other cloud providers to save on infrastructure costs, reduce redundancy, and  improve scalability. If you’re reading this article, chances are that you’re considering a cloud migration. Here is a 10-step cloud migration checklist to help you perform an easy and successful cloud migration with minimal downtime.

Document Business Needs

Identifying business needs may be the most important part of the cloud migration process. Before you take any other steps towards migrating legacy applications to the cloud, you must first identify the problems you are aiming to solve. Are you looking to improve scalability? Reduce costs? Improve security? All three? Make sure to set clear, realistic, and measurable goals for what you want to accomplish.

If you fail to identify business needs and set clear goals, you’re doing yourself a disservice. Identifying the problems you want to solve can help guide your migration team to ensure that goals are being met. For instance, parts of your migration might be prioritized differently depending on whether you are migrating primarily to reduce costs or to improve scalability. Make sure to clearly communicate goals and objectives to your team along with specific metrics for performance.

Identify Assets to be Migrated

Identifying your assets prior to the migration is important. You want to create a targeted plan with prioritized elements that need to be shifted to a cloud computing environment. Without the right team and planning, moving applications and data to a cloud provider is time consuming, complex, and costly. Ensuring you have a clear understanding of your migration plan and your intended cloud infrastructure will help guide your migration. 

When making decisions about which applications to move to the cloud, you must consider the level of change desired. Simply moving applications over as-is, also known as lift and shift, and is designed to move on-premises applications to the cloud while only minimally altering the architecture of the application. Another option is to apply a deep cloud integration where you open up the opportunity to alter the application while concurrently moving the application into a cloud environment. As you transition this application into the cloud platform, you can make modifications to apply cloud-specific services, such as auto-scaling to your application during the migration process. If you are curious about costs, AWS has an extremely useful tool that you can utilize to calculate costs.

Identify Information Security and Regulatory Requirements

This is an often overlooked step during cloud migrations but can be absolutely critical. Every year new regulations are promulgated that affect how your business can collect, store, and process data. In addition, some types of data such as personal health information (PHI) and personally identifiable information (PII) may require additional security measures in order to maintain compliance. It is critical to identify data and cybersecurity compliance requirements that affect you and to ensure your new cloud environment enables you to meet them. Some requirements worth considering are:

There are a multitude of compliance requirements that affect data security and processing.

Identify Criticality, Risk, and Dependencies

Once you have identified the assets you are going to migrate, along with applicable regulatory and data processing requirements, it is highly advisable you set clear thresholds for acceptable risk. You may be willing to risk more extended downtime for some applications than others. Acceptable levels of risk and strategies to mitigate risk to acceptable levels should be well documented. 

You also need to ensure that dependencies between identified assets are clearly mapped and that a level of criticality is assigned to each asset. As you go forward, this enables your project manager to ensure that your new environment runs smoothly. During this exercise, you may also find redundancies and other opportunities to streamline services. This can reduce costs and improve the performance of your new environment.

Decide How Much to Outsource

Even the most capable in-house IT teams can have difficulty performing a successful cloud migration. Cloud migrations are often large, highly complex projects involving a myriad of dependencies, different types of data, and a variety of stakeholders. In most cases, it is best to outsource a substantial portion of legacy application migrations, if not their entirety. In the long-run, hiring a highly specialized team with extensive experience working across a variety of cloud platforms can save you substantial amounts of time, money, and effort. 

If you choose to leverage in-house employees for the majority of your migration you should consider hiring a cloud consulting firm to provide guidance and support. Having consultants on hand to help roadmap and execute your migration can save an enormous amount of headache and cost further down the road. 

Appoint a Project Manager

In order to have a successful migration, you need to ensure that a single individual is responsible for the execution and outcome. Ideally, you should appoint a Cloud Migration Project Manager and provide him or her with several architects and IT professionals with significant experience working in the cloud. The migration project manager will serve as the leader for your cloud migration and will oversee the architecture, testing, data migration process, and cutover. Having a project manager is absolutely indispensable for executing a successful cloud migration. We recommend looking for someone who has experience:

Choose the Right Cloud Provider and Strategy

After you identify your business needs and select a qualified and experienced project manager, the next step on your cloud migration checklist is to identify the right cloud solution for your business. You will need to choose the right cloud provider, along with the right type of cloud. The main solution providers in the market today are:

Along with choosing a provider (or providers), you will also need to decide on whether or not you want to be cloud agnostic or specific. Being cloud specific can have it’s advantages. For instance your team may be familiar with a provider already or it may be cheaper to work exclusively with a vendor. However, this can have it’s disadvantages. Not being cloud agnostic could prohibit you from moving away from your vendor in the future, or, at the very least, it could make moving away from or negotiating with a vendor increasingly difficult. 

If you choose to opt into a multi-cloud strategy, you will want to consider migrating applications to different clouds. This adds a level of complexity to the migration. Having two different cloud providers with differing sets of applications helps increase your leverage in negotiations with providers. A key disadvantage is you would be operating with multiple vendors, and if either platform has issues, including downtime, the user experience for your consumers would be negatively impacted.

Create a Plan

When you are working on a cloud migration plan, there are a few things you need to consider. First, you should research cloud providers to determine which service best fits your business. This could include looking at the type of data you will be migrating, how you want that data to be accessed, and what the cost will be. Creating a cloud migration plan is crucial for a smooth transition, and this will help map out how this migration will proceed. Your plan should include a detailed outline of the following phases:

At the same time, you should also map out a set of KPIs (key performance indicators) to measure your cloud migration. These might include:

Understanding the KPIs on your cloud migration checklist will help you develop a strong migration strategy. Applying a data-focused approach, through the use of KPIs and metrics, informs your future business strategies and provides a baseline to optimize off of once the migration is complete.

Execute Against your Plan

You’ve put in a lot of work up to this point, but it’s about to pay off. By following a comprehensive and streamlined cloud migration checklist, you’ve set yourself up for success. Unfortunately, many companies begin cloud migrations with inadequate preparation which results in unnecessary downtime, cost overruns, and potentially catastrophic failure. Now it’s time to execute against your plan. Make sure that your project manager (or outsourced cloud migration provider) is set up for success and has everything they need to begin. 

Make sure to schedule regular meetings with your PM to track the status of the migration, answer any questions, and address any concerns. A capable project manager should be able to give you a detailed breakdown of workloads, a specific timeline for the migration, and the current status of the project.

Continuously Optimize Your New Environment

Once you have successfully cutover to your new environment, your work isn’t over. In fact, it’s just beginning and that’s a good thing. At this point, your new environment should have accomplished or be well on the way to accomplishing the business needs you identified early on. Once your new environment is up and running you should take time to identify your current performance against the KPIs established earlier. Work with your in-house team, cloud consultants, and other key stakeholders to make continuous improvements to your new environment.

Feeling a bit overwhelmed by it all? Our team at ThorTech is ready to help. We have executed numerous successful, highly complex cloud migrations for a variety of companies. Our engineers have the experience and skill to jump in and help you execute a successful cloud migration that leaves you with a high-performance, cost-optimized cloud environment. Fill out the form below for a free consultation.

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