Cloud Migration and Deployment

Migration & Deployment

Migrating workloads to new cloud environments has to be planned and managed in detail.

The migration must be driven by a clear understanding of the impact that the final architecture

and migration pattern will have on the end-state functionality, performance, availability and

security of the applications. The right cloud operating model must also be in place before workloads

are moved en masse to deliver the cloud promise of lower cost, agility, scalability and flexibility.

Phase 1: Migration Preparation and Business Planning

Here you determine the right objectives and begin to get an idea of the types of benefits you will see. 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.

Phase 2: Portfolio Discovery and Planning

Next, you need to understand your IT portfolio, the dependencies between applications, and begin to consider what types of migration strategies you will need to employ to meet your business case objectives. With the portfolio discovery and migration approach, you are in a good position to build a full business case.

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.

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.