Our Cloud Migration Strategy

Application migration to the cloud: reliable, secure and cost-effective

We approach the cloud migration process as a 6 step process:

cloud migration approach

Our standard approach and blueprints help you to assess the opportunity, build the migration plan and realize the cloud migration.

Our cloud migration consists of 6 phases:

  1. Quick Scan
  2. Analysis phase
  3. Design and Planning
  4. Preparation
  5. Migration
  6. Optimize and operate

1. Quick Scan

A quick scan will provide your organization and us an insight in the scope and state of the as-is situation. This will enable us to better understand and estimate the cloud migration complexity on the different levels.

Goal:
  • Create first impression of scope, challenges, and activities.
Activities:

On-site quick review and analysis of the “as-is” situation.

  • Inventory of Business, IT and legal requirements
    • Interviews/workshops
    • Documents/agreements reviews
  • Applications/Infrastructure
    • Quick overview based on existing application landscape/ IT Architecture
    • Insight in current Cloud setup
  • People
    • Informal interviews with your organization IT Infrastructure-team members
Deliverables:
  • High level scope definition, including risks.
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2. Analysis phase

In the analysis phase all the information will be gathered that is needed for the planning and implementation of the migration.

Goal:
  • Create insight in the “as-is” situation, SLA’s, requirements, gaps in knowledge, gaps in processes.
Activities:
  • Detailed Inventory of Business, IT and legal requirements
    • Interviews/workshops
    • Documents/agreements reviews
  • Applications
    • Create full insight in application landscape through interviews, existing inventories and insights, configurations, existing IT Architecture
      • Application, versions, database, hardware requirements, specifics, relations with other applications
      • Category: level of importance (e.g. business critical/critical/supporting/other)
      • Requirements: security, reliability (RTO/RPO), performance (responsiveness)
      • Current challenges
      • Dependencies
      • Risks
  • Hardware
    • Specifications
    • End of life dates
  • People
    • Inventory of specific knowledge, through interviews
  • Processes
    • Inventory of dependencies of IT components
Deliverables:
  • Inventory of as-is situation on technical and business level
  • High level knowledge overview

3. Design and planning phase

Based on the detailed information gathered in the analysis phase, a detailed infrastructure design can be made. Also a plan per application will be defined, including the priorities and risks associated.

Goal:
  • Create a design and roadmap for migration + action plan knowledge/organization
Activities:
  • Define high level cloud infrastructure
    • Define the cloud design based on the well architected framework that complies with the requirements as defined.
  • Define migration planning and supporting activities
    • Define the migration strategy per application using the “6R’s of application migration” model. Application, versions, database, hardware requirements, specifics, relations with other applications
    • Plan migration per application.
    • Align other stakeholders.
    • Define priorities: quick wins, business requirements, end of life hardware.
  • Knowledge improvement
    • Define your organization “to-be” team requirements
      • Define training plan your organization employees
      • Train/hire/subcontract decisions
Deliverables:
  • Detailed migration plan with priorities
  • Knowledge improvement plan/organizational recommendations
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4. Preparation phase

During the preparation phase the base setup, security, networking and tooling will be defined.

Goal:
  • Setup the basis of the cloud infrastructure and setup the required tooling.
Activities:
  • Setup of the landing zone, including security policies, networking, user management/access management, integration with existing your organization environment(s)
  • Setup of monitoring
  • Setup of different backup/HA scenarios
Deliverables:
  • Code for the landingzone,
  • Landingzone

5. Migration phase

The migration will consist of the different migrations of applications/data.

Goal:
  • Migrate the on-premise IT to Cloud
Activities:
  • Application migration includes:
    • data-migration
    • application migration
    • setup and test of HA
    • setup of a backup strategy
    • setup of monitoring
    • setup of the tagging
  • The rollout of the new environment will be defined and documented in code.
  • Decommissioning of “old” infrastructure
Deliverables:
  • To-be cloud based application environment
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6. Optimization/operate phase

After the successful migration of the applications and acceptancy by the users, the environment will move into the operate mode. The operation team will take care of further fine-tuning and optimization.

In order to get into low-ops mode, for all significant incidents root-cause analysis will be done and the infrastructure code will be adapted accordingly to avoid new incidents.