When migrating to the cloud, the ability to move and achieve business value fast is a critical differentiator.
Organisations begin to lose momentum, and executive buy-in wanes if progress stalls. When results are realised too slowly (or aren’t properly quantified and communicated), the business case for migration weakens—potentially jeopardizing the project’s financing and support.
Over the last 15 years, Amazon Web Services (AWS) has helped thousands of organisations migrate workloads to the cloud to reduce costs, improve operational resiliency, gain business agility, and build a foundation for rapid innovation. Based on this experience, AWS has built a complete and proven approach for migrating one to thousands of workloads to the cloud—and helping you quickly and efficiently realize, measure, and communicate the tangible benefits of your migration.
Often, the decision to migrate workloads to the cloud starts with a desire to reduce costs; however, customers find that the strategic value of migrating to AWS goes well beyond the cost savings of retiring legacy infrastructure.
AWS research and experience has identified eight key drivers that compel businesses to migrate to the cloud. These are:
- Cost reduction
- Agility and staff productivity
- Improved security and operational resilience
- Outsourcing and hardware/software end-of-life
- Data centre consolidation
- Digital transformation
- Going global quickly, mergers and acquisitions (M&A)
- New technologies (such as AI/ML and IoT)
Foundation for a successful AWS migration
Organisations that migrate a substantial application portfolio early in their journey—and combine those efforts with modernisation initiatives—generally derive the biggest business results from their AWS migrations.
Along with AWS, FITTS can work with you through a three-phase migration approach that integrates modernisation into the migration process.
The three-phase migration process and the seven migration patterns (“The 7 R’s”) described in the blog “The Seven common patterns for migration” serve as guiding principles to structure your cloud migration journey in ways that help you realise fast, continuous, quantifiable business value.
The three-phase migration process
Every migration is different; however, based on AWS experience in helping organisations of all maturity levels, industries, and geographies migrate to the cloud, they have seen a standardised migration process take shape. This process can generally be broken into three phases of activities: 1) Assess, 2) Mobilize, and 3) Migrate & Modernise.
Following this three-phase approach is the best way for your organisation to efficiently and quickly migrate tens, hundreds, or thousands of workloads.
It is important to note that, while each phase is a common component of a successful migration, they are not discrete phases. As an example, AWS have seen where customers have migrated an initial application and it becomes an iterative process allowing them to migrate additional applications and workloads to AWS. As you iterate and migrate more workloads, you will be able to drive repeatability and predictability in processes and procedures, accelerating and optimizing your migration efforts.
Phase 1: Assess
In the Assess phase, we can help assess your on-premises or co-location resources and build a right-sized and optimized cost projection for running workloads in the cloud. AWS offers services and tools that can help with assessment.
The AWS Migration Readiness Assessment is a process of gaining insights into how far along you are in your cloud journey, understanding your current cloud-readiness strengths and weaknesses, and building an action plan to close identified gaps. Use of the AWS Cloud Adoption Framework (CAF) as a guide can help ensure that you have a holistic view of the transformation initiative that is required for an effective move to the cloud.
Phase 2: Mobilise
In the Mobilise phase, we will help address gaps in your organisation’s readiness that were uncovered during assessment, with a focus on building your baseline environment (the “landing zone”), driving operational readiness, and developing cloud skills.
The AWS Cloud Adoption Readiness tool helps develop plans for your cloud adoption based on your migration readiness. AWS Migration Hub automates the planning and tracking of application migrations across multiple AWS and partner tools, allowing you to choose the migration tools that best fit your needs.
Phase 3: Migrate & Modernise
During the Migrate & Modernise phase, each of your workloads will be designed, migrated, and validated. AWS Migration Hub allows you to quickly get progress updates across all of your migrations, easily identify and troubleshoot any issues, and reduce the overall time and effort spent on your migration projects.
For many workloads, the best approach is to rapidly move to the cloud and then rearchitect in AWS. CloudEndure, an AWS company, provides AWS Application Migration Service to quickly rehost a large number of machines from multiple source platforms (physical, virtual, or another cloud) to AWS, without worrying about compatibility, performance disruption, long cutover windows, or long distance data replications.
Many enterprises use the migration effort to also modernise their businesses by refactoring their legacy technology portfolio. Some proven ways to do this include infrastructure automation (elastic infrastructure, containers, AI/ML), agile development practices (DevOps, test automation, CI/CD, observability), cloud-native architectural patterns (stateless, microservices, serverless, data lakes), Windows modernisation, database modernisation, and product-based operating models (product teams, business outcome alignment, full-stack vs. platform structures). These methods accelerate innovation and increase agility, resiliency, and efficiency to accelerate your speed to market and customer outcomes.
Start your cloud migration journey today. Contact FITTS and speak to an expert.
