Making a Successful Migration to AWS

Migrating to a cloud environment like AWS can introduce unknowns and potential setbacks. But with the right resources, it doesn’t have to.

AWS provides organizations moving to the platform with an array of native tools to assist with the migration process. And when combined with Redapt’s own proprietary migration technology, it’s relatively easy to create a rock-solid migration plan tailored to meet your own organization’s unique needs.

Building a migration plan

There are four steps to follow when planning a move to the cloud. These are Assess, Mobilize, Migrate, and Modernize. Let’s dig deeper into each:

• Assess is the kickoff phase, where your current workloads and data are thoroughly analyzed to inform your eventual needs in AWS
• Mobilize is the critical step of ensuring everyone within your organization is on board — and prepared for — the migration to the cloud
• Migrate is when your organization pulls the trigger on taking its data, applications, and workloads to your new cloud environment
• Modernize is the process of examining your applications and determining which of them needs to be rebuilt, refactored, or replaced in order to fully leverage the cloud

While each of these steps has its own level of granularity, each is critical to go through in order to make your migration to AWS a smooth one.

As for the actual process of migrating, here are the four major areas of focus:

1. Workload analysis

In this first action, your team — or an outside party assisting you — will need to identify and prioritize the workloads prime for migration to AWS. These workloads should be on the smaller side, with defined metrics for success (increased speed of development, etc.) to run as an initial proof-of-concept before exploring other workloads for the cloud. Within AWS, there are tools such as Migration Evaluator (formerly TSO Logic) to help streamline the process.

2. Governance and security

AWS has extremely robust security tools in place, but it’s critical to establish the building blocks for governance and security in your new cloud environment before making the actual migration. The core areas to focus on are identity of users, access management, logging and monitoring, infrastructure security, data protection, and incident response.

3. Testing

Your organization’s applications, data, and workloads need a safe place to land once they arrive in AWS. Thorough testing of your new environment can reveal potential disruptions and weaknesses before it’s too late.

4. Migration

Finally, it’s time to make the move. As part of the migration, you need to design your preferred architecture, migrate your data and applications, and work with your teams to establish processes for managing and optimizing your new AWS environment going forward.

Don’t fly blind into the cloud

As we’ve highlighted, the key to successful adoption of AWS is:

• A thorough assessment of current capabilities and needs, including workloads and on-premises datacenter
• Optimization to best leverage the cloud and save resources
• Adoption and migration plans to make the transition to the cloud with as little disruption as possible
• An understanding of the various tools available through cloud platforms like Azure and how you can potentially benefit from them

If your company is interested in migrating to AWS or any other cloud provider, contact us today.