The Migration Process

There may be some cases where you contemplate large legacy migrations in isolation, however, we are finding that migrations are usually part of a larger enterprise transformation effort. The patterns we have seen around migrating to the cloud commonly follow a 5-phase approach.

Phase 1: Migration Preparation and Business Planning

When looking at a migration, planning and preparation take up most of the effort depending upon the interconnectivity of various components. Here is when the right objectives are determined, and the types of benefits are assessed. It starts with some foundational experience and developing a preliminary business case for a migration. This requires taking your objectives into account, along with the age and architecture of your existing applications, and their constraints.

We have partners such as RISC Networks, Atadata, Cloudamize, TSOLogic, and Apptio that have experience in this area.

Phase 2: Portfolio Discovery and Planning

Here we take a deeper look at the IT portfolios. The goal is to establish where our dependencies are between the applications and what type of migrations might work best. This phase has more focus on application discovery to build a clear use case or business case for each application. We can consider a retire strategy too depending on the age of the environment to be migrated.

We have partners such as RISC Networks, Atadata, Cloudamize, TSOLogic, and Apptio that have experience in this area.

Phase 3 & Phase 4: Designing, Migrating, and Validating Application

Here the focus moves from the portfolio level to the individual application level and you design, migrate, and validate each application. Each application is designed, migrated, and validated according to one of the six common application strategies (“The 6 R’s”). Once you have some foundational experience from migrating a few apps and a plan in place that the organization can get behind - it’s time to accelerate the migration and achieve scale.

Partners such as Cloudendure, CloudVelox, Atadata, Racemi, and Attuinity can help you here as well as AWS Server Migration Service (SMS) and AWS Database Migration Service (DMS).

Phase 5: Operate

As applications are migrated, you iterate on your new foundation, turn off old systems, and constantly iterate toward a modern operating model. Your operating model becomes an evergreen set of people, process, and technology that constantly improves as you migrate more applications. We have partners such as AppDynamics, NewRelic, and Dynatrace that can help you continue to iterate on your operating model as you move more to the cloud.