1. Define Your Goals and Objectives:
Before undertaking an AWS migration, it's important for organizations to clearly define their goals and objectives for the project. This involves understanding what needs to be accomplished, setting realistic expectations, and creating a roadmap for success. It also requires taking into account factors such as budget allotment, service level agreements, and any potential regulatory compliance requirements.
2. Select Your Cloud Performance KPIs:
Measurement of success for a cloud migration project is essential for ensuring that objectives are met. Setting up key performance indicators, or KPIs provides an easy way to objectively track progress as the migration progresses. Examples of KPIs include response times, availability, scalability metrics, cost optimization, security posture, and data transfer rate.
3. Assess Your Current Infrastructure:
It's important to thoroughly assess your existing infrastructure before attempting a cloud migration project. Evaluating not only applications but also hardware environment and resource utilization can provide valuable insight into what needs to be migrated, how it should be done, and what challenges may arise during the process.
4. Define Your Migration Strategy:
Once the assessment is complete, an organization should have a better idea of what needs to be done to migrate from their current setup to AWS. This includes selecting a cloud service provider, transferring data securely, developing any custom code necessary for a successful migration, and testing results before going live.
5. Train Your Employees on the Cloud:
Before performing a full-scale migration project it's important for organizations to ensure that employees are adequately trained in cloud technologies. This reduces the risks associated with stumbling blocks during the transition period and also provides employees with knowledge on how to use and manage new systems once they're up and running.
6. Conduct a Comprehensive Risk Assessment:
Performing a risk assessment prior to migration is critical for success. This involves assessing any potential threats posed by the transition, as well as developing and executing plans to mitigate those risks. Potential issues could include security vulnerabilities, data loss, unexpected downtime or service disruption, or compatibility issues with existing applications.
7. Prepare Your Applications and Data:
Before beginning an AWS cloud migration project it's essential to take an inventory of all the applications and data that will need to be transferred over. This includes ensuring that current software licenses are up-to-date, identifying any dependencies between components, replicating databases if necessary, configuring services for optimal performance on the new platform, and verifying backup solutions are in place as part of the process.
8. Perform the Migration:
Once all of the preparation steps have been taken, it's time to perform the actual AWS cloud migration. This can involve multiple stages such as testing, piloting, and a final cutover. Throughout each stage it's important to assess performance metrics against baseline expectations and ensure that any problems encountered are quickly identified and addressed before going live.