Cloud Migration Strategy - Discovery and Assessment
Context
We all know that migrating on-premise workloads to the cloud offers numerous advantages for individuals, businesses, and organizations. These advantages include cost efficiency, scalability, security and reliability, data backup and recovery, speed and performance, reduced IT management, competitive advantage, and many more. Cloud migration typically involves several phases, starting with discovery and assessment. In this article, I will cover the Discovery and Assessment phase of the cloud migration journey.
Discovery and Assessment
Many organizations adopt various approaches to carry out the discovery and assessment phase. Personally, I favor the following method for executing this phase:
- Conduct Meetings with Customers: To gain insights into the high-level landscape, I engage in meetings with the customers and gather in high level landscape details.
- Utilize Cloud Tools from Providers (Azure or AWS): I leverage cloud tools provided by platforms like Azure or AWS, which aid in conducting the discovery process and generate landscape reports.
- Questionnaires: I have created well-crafted questionnaires to share with the customers, facilitating the collection of additional information about their landscape.
Classification
Now that we have the data and report prepared, our next step is to categorize the workloads primarily into two groups: Cloud compatible or not compatible. Afterward, we can delve deeper into further grouping.
Questionnaires (Examples)
| Questions you could ask to your customer |
|---|
| Type of application the customer is using. |
| Questions related to application performance. |
| Queries about high availability and disaster recovery measures. |
| Monitoring-related inquiries. |
| Questions about the workload the application handles. |
| Inquiries about the volume of data the application manages. |
| SLA-related questions. |
| License-related inquiries. |
| Operating system-related queries. |
| Questions related to storage requirements. |
| What are the security requirements for customer’s application and data in the cloud? |
| Do you have any specific compliance regulations or industry standards to follow? |
| To what extent is the data being migrated considered sensitive, and what protective measures are necessary for its safeguarding? |
| Do you possess policies regarding data retention or guidelines for handling data? |
| What are your budget considerations for cloud migration and ongoing operations? |
| Are there any specific performance benchmarks or expectations for the application? |
| What backup and recovery mechanisms are required for your data in the cloud? |
| How frequently do you need backups, and what is your recovery point objective (RPO) and recovery time objective (RTO)? |
| Does your application have any constraints that may impact its migration to the cloud? |
| Are there any architectural changes required for cloud compatibility? |
| How will users access the application in the cloud, and what are the access control requirements? |
| Do you have any location-specific considerations for user access? |
| What are the governance policies and compliance requirements that need to be adhered to during the migration? |
Assessment Template - Sample
| Serial Number | Workload | Description | Type | Complexity | Criticality | Migration Approach |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| 1 | Main Server | This is a load balancer server | Windows Server | Low | Critical | Lift and Shift |
| 2 | Store Server | This is a database server | Windows Server | High | Critical | Lift and Shift |
| 3 | Business Website | This is a web application | Application | Medium | Critical | Rebuild(Replace) |
| 4 | Time Updater | This is a scheduler job | Application | Low | Not Critical | Rebuild(Replace) |
Happy Migration!