IT environments are larger and more complicated than ever before, causing a systematic strategy to migrating IT assets and processes to AWS. For an AWS migration plan, cloud users must examine their present infrastructure and licence position, as well as their business motivations.
It’s just as important to pick a certified AWS partner who understands the complexities of your business. While there is no one-size-fits-all cloud migration strategy, it is critical to assess your readiness and put in place a few important protocols to ensure a smooth transfer.
Perimattic’s staff has assisted enterprises in moving to the cloud as a prominent AWS Consulting Partner. We’ve identified five basic best practises that should form the cornerstone of any AWS migration plan based on our cloud migration expertise.
Steps For Choosing AWS Migration Plan
#1 Get a clear picture of your current stack
Determine what you want to get out of the AWS cloud, whether it’s digital transformation, lower operational expenses, or more productivity. You must be an expert on your environment before beginning a cloud migration effort.
For precise assessments, improved judgments, and optimum design, good data is required. Questions needed to consider prior:
● Do you know where your apps, services, processes, hosts, data centres, and technologies are running?
● Can you identify applicants who can be moved to the cloud with confidence?
● Are there any early priorities that can be identified?
● Are there identifiable, early priorities?
The following factors may influence your decision to migrate, depending on where your company is in its life cycle:
● Increased business agility
● Enhanced security
● Operational resilience
● Faster innovation
● Reduced time-to-market
● Cost savings
● Development of new technologies and apps
● Datacenter consolidation
● Higher productivity
● Faster disaster recovery
● Improved cross-team collaboration and work performance
#2 Assess your current licensing situation
Consider your licensing situation, too. Many software providers do not allow customers to transfer their licences from on-premises to the cloud, and some publishers may restrict software use in specific countries. Failure to comply can cause hefty fines.
Licensing expenses can account for a significant portion of your IT budget, and no company can afford to waste money on software they don’t need or utilise. An AWS Optimization and Licensing Assessment (OLA) can help in this situation.
An AWS OLA includes a free assessment of your current on-premises and cloud infrastructure, as well as personalised recommendations. At the end of the assessment, you’ll know precisely what resources you’re using for each type of workload, what services you need, and how to bring the costs down.
These insights can help you save money on licencing and run your business more efficiently.
Users can also use the application to simulate various scenarios and begin a migration proof-of-concept.
It allows them to determine the cost of bringing their existing licenses to the cloud or switching to new services and identify opportunities to save money.
#3 Understand the AWS shared responsibility model
AWS has a shared responsibility approach, so security and compliance in the cloud are shared between AWS and its customers. AWS ensures the security of the cloud environment, which safeguards the global infrastructure that underpins its services.
Software, hardware, and networking applications make up this infrastructure. In the cloud, the user is in charge of security. That means it’s up to you to secure your data, manage user permissions, and safeguard workloads against malware and other forms of cyber-crime.
A thorough approach to dependency analysis will help you expect the consequences of essential services. You don’t want to move a service and introduce excessive latency or expenses because of a neglected dependency, for example.
What to consider:
● What services do you have in your environment?
● What services can we migrate in isolation?
● Which services have tight dependencies?
● What network traffic between services you migrate and those needing to stay in the current data center?
● What are the existing patterns of service utilisation and resource consumption?
● How much will they cost you once they’re in the cloud?
#4 Be smart on database migration with the power of deep knowledge
Understanding database dependencies will give you insights that inform what to migrate, keep, or replace with database services in the cloud. What to consider –
● What databases do we have?
● Which are candidates for moving?
● What is the current resource usage of our database servers?
● Which applications and services rely on a database that a migration might affect?
● Should some databases be co-located?
● How are critical database queries and stored procedures performing right now?
● What tables and data should we extract into a less expensive database system?
#5 Choose a certified AWS partner
Consider collaborating with an AWS authorised partner to ensure compliance and design a cloud migration strategy tailored to your needs. To acquire their accreditation, AWS partners must complete comprehensive training and pass an exam.
They understand cloud migration’s complexities, from workload placement to infrastructure performance and cost projections. It would be easier to manage your business activities in the cloud and avoid technological concerns if you have a single point of contact.
#6 Define performance measurements for the post-migration period
Finally, for post-migration analysis, ensure sure you have measurable success criteria. Create cloud performance KPIs that are in line with your company’s objectives. These may include:
● Network input/output, data exposures, and service error rates are examples of security KPIs.
● Response times, uptime, CPU utilisation, and service availability are some of the infrastructure performance KPIs.
● Customer satisfaction scores, call rates, error rates, and latency are examples of end-user experience measurements.
#7 Focus on feature-based business benefit with functional migration
Get information on back-end services, front-end API services, or user-facing features throughout real user monitoring. It helps you decide to migrate individual features or complete applications based on business benefits. What to consider:
● What is the distance between your data centre and your key revenue-generating features?
● Is it possible to improve the user experience by bringing the function closer to the user?
● Is there any specific hardware that would be preferable for on-demand cloud infrastructure?
Conclusion
Perimattic’s digital experience monitoring (DEM) provides unrivalled monitoring visibility–a 360-degree picture of every user journey–and evaluates and improves customer experience using real-time data, including business effect.
