Cloud Migration Method
The cloud migration method will give a steering wheel, cloud migration tool kit and the knowledge for keeping the migration under control. It will provide the best practice and user experience on how to approach the migration from on-premise to the cloud!
For performing the cloud migration, a standard method can be applied. The method will provide a practical reference to help IT and business decision makers to analyze and consider application and infrastructure migration to the cloud. It includes a sequence of steps, along with guidance, strategies, best practice examples and templates, that take into consideration both business and technical requirements. It consist of four phases:
- Planning and Discovery
- Design and Build
- Migrate and Validate
- Handover and Optimize
Within the method, each of the four stages outlined above, has a series of pre-defined activities. In each activity, there are a series of pre-defined associated tasks, hints & tips and outputs section.
Planning and discovery deals with understanding the business drivers, future operational model and security requirements, mobilizing resources, creating a business case, performing discovery, define high-level migration plan and conclude the target operating model. The decision needs to be made for move the application as-is to the cloud, or re-platform/re-architected/re-factored in the cloud.
Design and build involves creating a prioritized backlog of applications and setting up the landing zone. Performing a more detailed discovery around the application architecture as well as business and technical requirements, designing the low-level application end state, build the target foundation and prepare and execute a pilot migration. A target application architecture is designed along with a clear plan for the migration and cut-over approach, tooling and testing.
Migrate and validate will provision the environment, focus on license management, define the detailed migration planning, integrate the application with the required operational tools as well as external integration points with other applications (e.g. DNS, AD, DHCP, etc.) and test against baseline functionality and performance. Cutover will users redirected to the new application in the cloud and the source application is ready to be decommissioned. Testing validates that the migration success criteria for the application is realized and user acceptance testing (UAT) is performed.
Handover to the support teams and optimization will enable innovation, IT business opportunities and aggressive business objectives. At this stage the optimization and maintenance occurs of the cloud footprint. Typical activities are handover to support, automate IT management, optimize scalability, and decommissioning of the onsite infrastructure.