AWS Presciptive Guidance

To optimize your cloud adoption and migration, you must first assess and evaluate your enterprise for readiness. After you assess the readiness of your organization, you can accelerate your cloud adoption and establish a foundation for migration at scale through the hands-on experience of migrating a first wave of applications in just a few weeks. We discuss these phases in more detail in the following topics.

The iterative approach to cloud adoption discussed in this guide can be broken out into the three high-level phases of assess, mobilize, and migrate.

Assess

The first phase of a cloud migration begins with a cloud readiness assessment of your enterprise’s current state. These assessment tasks give you a clear picture of what you will migrate, as well as a business case for migration and total cost of ownership (TCO) analysis for migration.

A Migration Readiness Assessment (MRA) is a process that provides you with the following:

• An understanding about how far along your enterprise is in the cloud journey
• An understanding of your current strengths and weaknesses in relation to a cloud-ready enterprise
• An action plan to close identified gaps

This assessment is based on the AWS Cloud Adoption Framework (AWS CAF) and its six perspectives: business, people, governance, platform, security, and operations. Using this framework during the assessment phase helps ensure that you have a holistic view of the transformation initiative that will support an effective move to the cloud.

The assess phase includes a rapid discovery process with high-level TCO assessment in addition to the MRA. These steps will be useful as you progress towards obtaining stakeholder commitment and funding for the larger initiatives that follow.

Mobilize

With a strong understanding of your current state and your portfolio along with the solid business case, you develop in the assessment phase, you can demonstrate the value of the cloud to your organization.

The goal of the mobilize phase is to build foundational capability both in the organization and with the AWS environment with hands-on migration experience focused on security and operations automation. This process brings together your portfolio of tools and practices in a scalable and secure AWS landing zone. In this phase, you migrate a small set of business applications to the cloud, while enforcing an agile and scalable delivery culture, team structure, and change management process.

The AWS mobilize approach includes a defined set of activities across eight distinct workstreams:

• Detailed business case
• Detailed portfolio discovery
• Application migration
• Migration governance
• AWS landing zone
• Security, risk, and compliance
• Operations
• People: skills, culture, change, and leadership

With this approach, activities under these workstreams are delivered across eight two-week sprints.

Mobilize delivers the following outcomes:

• Improve your IT staff’s skill and competency for migration and organizational transformation by building confidence with methodology, processes, and tooling
• Define and automate security, risk, and compliance policies to accommodate operational controls
• Define and implement an AWS landing zone that can scale as you migrate additional applications
• Establish your cloud operating model
• Run applications in production capacity

Migration during the mobilize phase is an iterative process that evolves as your organization develops new skills, tools, and capabilities. These skills and capabilities build momentum and accelerate your migration efforts over time. Establishing the right foundation to build on is key to a successful migration. The AWS migration framework balances the business and technical efforts needed to complete a cloud migration. This model helps you identify key business drivers for migration and the best strategies for planning and implementing a successful cloud migration.

Migrate

The migrate phase uses the patterns, processes, tools, resources, and methodology defined and tested during the mobilize phase to migrate applications at scale. After using the best practices and lessons learned from the earlier phases, you can implement a migration factory, a blueprint of scaling implementation and operations, through automation and agile delivery.

Assess phase in action

In order to mobilize your workforce and resources to migrate your enterprise at scale, you must first assess your readiness and inventory your portfolio. These steps enable you to build a business case with right key performance indicators (KPIs) and metrics and to align key stakeholders and leadership on business goals. You will run the Migration Readiness Assessment (MRA) workstream during this phase.

Migration Readiness Assessment (MRA)

MRA is an AWS process of gaining insights about your enterprise’s current cloud readiness and building an action plan to close identified gaps, using the AWS Cloud Adoption Framework (AWS CAF).

The objective of this phase is to Assess and evaluate your enterprise’s readiness by answering questions based on the six AWS CAF perspectives.

Outcomes

• Understanding where your enterprise is in your cloud journey.
• Identification of areas of strength and weakness.
• Plan to fill the identified gaps.

Mobilize phase

The next step in preparing your workforce and resources to migrate your enterprise at scale is to break down the mobilize activities into different workstreams. Although the goal of the mobilize phase is the migration of business applications, this phase also provides an opportunity to lay the foundation for tooling, process, and culture that will accelerate your migration at scale. Most of these workstreams can run in parallel after the assessment phase is complete. The following workstreams should be run during this phase:

• Detailed business case
• Detailed portfolio discovery
• pplication migration
• Migration governance
• Landing zone
• Security, risk, and compliance
• Operations
• People: skills, culture, change, and leadership

These are discussed in detail in the following sections.

The objective is to Migrate business applications from on premises to the AWS Cloud:

• Define how to select and prioritize applications for migrations
• Understand proven best practices to migrate applications to AWS
• Validate your AWS landing zone, operations runbook, and security playbook by testing applications on AWS
• Train internal staff on AWS services and partner tools through hands-on experience
• Learn industry-accepted migration tools and techniques for different application types
• Get a head start by using existing epics (backlogs) from different migration patterns

Outcomes

• Validate different components of the AWS landing zone through application deployment and testing
• Validate the outlined operating model (an output of the operations workstream) by deploying, monitoring, and reporting on applications running on the AWS Cloud
• Learn scalable agile process and migration patterns for migrating different applications
• Learn how to design target architectures and how to use data migration, server migration, and vendor tools for automated migration
• Train resources on AWS services, and provide hands-on migration experience
• Validate your security playbook through a real-time audit of applications running on AWS
• Learn, implement, and validate a migration delivery process, including number of resources, velocity (speed of migration), quality assurance, release management, and integration with managed service providers (MSPs)

AWS partners and tools

When you have some foundational experience migrating a few applications and a plan in place that the organization supports, it’s time to accelerate the migration and achieve scale. Migration Delivery Partners, such as 2nd Watch and Accenture, can help you though every stage of migration. Migration Marketplace Partners such as RiverMeadow Software and Attunity can also help, and you can use tools and services such as AWS Server Migration Service (AWS SMS) and AWS Database Migration Service (AWS DMS).