How to Find the Right Strategy with Cloud Migration Decision Tree?

How to Find the Right Strategy with Cloud Migration Decision Tree?

Based on the 6R cloud migration strategies we discussed before, we use a cloud migration decision tree to find the best migration strategy for a specific use case.

Let's dive in and take a closer look into each of our cloud migration decision tree stages.

The process is separated into three stages: customer migration drivers, migration readiness and planning, and key determinants. The outcome of the process is the migration strategy that best fits customer's needs and goals.

Typical Customer Migration Drivers

We divide customer migration drivers into three groups.

• Cost reduction/avoidance: cloud technology, if implemented correctly, helps cut down the cost of your IT. This group includes license renewal, old hardware replacement, the need for increased operational efficiency, and similar cases.
• Risk reduction: cloud technology helps reduce risks and satisfy all sorts of regulatory requirements and compliances. This group includes regulatory requirements, end of life for hardware components, audit compliance, and similar cases.
• Business transformation: cloud technology helps simplify business transformation and increase the speed of innovation and agility.

Customer migration drivers help us understand customer's needs and define the focus of the cloud migration project.

Migration Readiness and Planning

The migration readiness and planning stage aims to understand the application and its environment and decide if it is a good candidate for migration. The decision about the application is based on the combination of four assessments.

• Application architecture assessment: our cloud experts analyze the application architecture and all application's dependencies.
• Security, risk & compliance assessment: our cloud experts analyze the security and compliance needs of the application.
• Technical complexity scoreboard: our cloud experts create a technical scoreboard based on the application architecture and technical requirements.
• Business complexity scoreboard: our cloud experts create a business complexity scoreboard based on the input from application users and the business's dependability on the app.

Key Determinants

If we conclude that the application is a good migration candidate, we use five key determinants to find the right migration strategy.

• Time: how much time do we have for a migration?
• Deadline: is there a fixed deadline for delivery?
• Investment: what is the size of the available investment?
• Application EOSL/EOL: is the application EOSL/EOL happening soon?
• Transformation: is migration worth a transformation process?

Migration Strategies

If the application is not a good candidate for migration, we have three available strategies.

• Re-purchase: we are finding an alternative software-as-a-service solution to move away from perpetual licenses.
• Retire: application is no longer needed or in use.
• Retain: application remains as it is.

If the application is a good candidate for migration, we have three available strategies.

• Re-host: also known as 'lift and shift,' applications are moved without changes. Re-host is a suitable method for large-scale, legacy migrations where organizations want to meet business objectives quickly.
• Re-platform: also known as 'lift, tinker, and shift,' applications are moved with a few cloud optimizations to achieve a tangible benefit. For example, a lot of time spent managing database instances can be saved by migration to a database-as-a-service platform like Amazon Relational Database Service (Amazon RDS).
• Re-factor: the method of re-imagining how the application is architected and developed using cloud-native features. It is driven by a strong need for new features, scaling, or performance that would be very difficult to achieve in the existing environment.

Conclusion

In this article, we talked about the cloud migration decision tree - it helps us find the right migration strategy.

Migration drivers help us focus on important cloud benefits that bring business value to our customers. Migration readiness is the stage that helps us understand the current application and its environment. Key determinants are used to find the best migration strategy based on factors such as time, money, and business complexity. Migration strategy defines the strategy for cloud migration.

As AWS Advanced Consulting Partner, we help companies of every industry and size solve their infrastructure problems with cloud migration.

If you want to know more about cloud migration, cloud technology in general, AWS cloud, or you want to try AWS services:

• visit our cloud migration service page;
• give us a call at +385 1 3141 562;
• contact our sales department at sales@heptabit.com.

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