Cloud migration requires a lot of planning and evaluation to move workloads safely without disrupting your business. Cloud infrastructure has an endless plethora of benefits, yet this comes with some blockers. Especially for companies that want to offload critical workloads without interrupting their day-to-day critical operations.

How exactly should these workloads be determined to be migrated to AWS? And when are companies ready to move their workloads? Addressing these questions and discuss the benefits of cloud migration alongside tips for saving time and resources.

A systematic and documented strategy is important to enable a smooth cloud migration without significant losses. The planning phase prevents companies from making mistakes that can lead to some challenges. Pre-migration planning saves long downtime and data loss. Companies that take a systematic approach always plan ahead to avoid data loss. They develop a disaster recovery plan to overcome such challenges. You can also use scheduling to effectively manage your cloud resources and keep everything running smoothly. When switching to the AWS cloud, enterprises need to adapt their cloud provider processes. Therefore, this is also planned in advance for a smooth transition.

Optimize cloud readiness assessments to prioritize workloads for successful cloud migration. This assessment allows you to plan how easy it is to move your workloads to the cloud without disrupting your business. This rating is required to create a cloud migration plan. The gap analysis also helps determine which workloads are healthy and important for moving to the cloud.

Breaking down the Cloud Readiness Assessment

The following is a breakdown of the assessments for effective planning of the transition without wasting budget and time.

You should evaluate your current technology, including all onsite hardware or storage devices your organization is currently using for operations.

Check your current security infrastructure to find weaknesses in your current security This allows you to implement a better security infrastructure in the cloud.

Identify the current problems your company is facing with its on-premises Calculate the current and expected cloud costs of your workload and evaluate the benefits.

Readiness assessment is useful in many ways. Organizations are aware of the problems they are facing with their current infrastructure. It also helps you estimate your migration budget and any operational disruptions that may occur during your shift.

AWS Migration – Benefits

1. Cost reduction

The often-cited advantage of cloud migration is reduced costs, sometimes substantially so. AWS client General Electric has recorded a 50% lower TCO, thanks to modernization. While this is an important factor in approaching migration, it is not the only one. Cloud migration can definitely contribute to IT operational savings, but even if only a small saving is achieved, the other benefits of AWS provide even more powerful incentives to modernize as soon as possible.

2. Agility & staff productivity

AWS migration is shown to lead to a significant increase in staff productivity, due to modern approaches to software engineering that enable improved efficiency on a task-by-task basis. This leads to over 60% boost in IT staff productivity, 7x less downtime, and 3x more features delivered in a year by software and product companies on average.

3. Security & resilience

According to Fortune 1000 averages, downtime costs companies up to $2.5 billion per year. With AWS, companies operate on one secure, robust platform, enabling far more governance and proven solutions like AWS’ Next Generation Landing Zone for safe, streamlined testing and improved security at every level.

4. End-of-life hardware & software

Cloud migration goes a long way to solving end-of-life product challenges. AWS does all the heavy lifting, making it easy for customers using end-of-life Microsoft products to migrate their databases and servers to the cloud and modernize in a streamlined way. Take action before it becomes an urgent problem.

5. Data center consolidation

Streamline your data center operations and free up a lot of wasted resources to focus on innovation and growth. By consolidating data centers in the AWS cloud, companies can save up to a third of their infrastructure costs and ensure robust, centralized data operations that speak the same language cross-enterprise.

6. Digital transformation

In a digital age, organizations are becoming far more customer-centric, and this requires a far more comprehensive and robust digital footprint. With AWS cloud migration, companies become fully digitized and transform their workflows for the new digital world.

7. Scale quickly

The flexibility afforded by AWS is key to scalability and growth. AWS enables organizations to scale at their own pace, with no limits, adding resources at the right time and expanding their cloud environment to meet changing business needs and goals. It is the ideal infrastructure for companies going global quickly, or merging companies who demand a consolidated, scalable IT infrastructure.

8. Integrating IoT and Machine Learning

For companies launching IoT networks or integrating artificial intelligence and machine learning in their operations, AWS provides the elasticity to overcome a wide range of challenges, including scalability, flexibility, security, and data access. The AWS cloud enables faster, nimble IoT integration, facilitating continuous innovation when companies need it most.

Select and prioritize First-Mover workloads for AWS migration

The goal of cloud migration is to move the current workload without disrupting the enterprise’s operations. You can only select and prioritize specific workloads while other components continue to function in your on-premises environment.

When prioritizing applications and workloads for cloud migration, it is important to first select the application that will be most profitable to your business. Here’s a step-by-step approach to prioritizing workloads:

Step 1: Prioritize Tier-One Workloads 

Tier One workloads consist of all applications that are not essential to your business. Applications in this category do not pose a significant risk to the operation of the company. First Mover should migrate tier one workloads as a priority to avoid downtime. This type of workload can be configured with applications that do not need to run 24/7. Seasonal applications and other environments such as sales demos and training labs also fall into this category.

Step 2: Migrating Tier-2 Workload

Tier2 workloads typically consist of low-risk applications. These applications are also not essential to the business and pose little risk to current operations. Applications in this category are up and running 24 hours a day, but are not significant enough to interfere with the normal functioning of your enterprise infrastructure. This makes migrating such applications a second priority.

Step 3: Identification of Tier-3 Workload

This category includes all business-critical applications within the enterprise. These applications typically host local sites with the best protection and disaster recovery plans. It’s also important to keep everything in operation. All applications in this category require technical expertise to migrate successfully with minimal disruption to all businesses within the enterprise. Leverage the “Crawl-Walk-Run” technique for cloud migration by prioritizing the applications with the least impact on your business and then slowly migrating to mission-critical applications.

Migration Assessment: Leveraging on Citrus Consulting Services Business Analysts, Pre-Sales Consultants and Account Managers, we are able to analyze specific attributes related to both application and infrastructural elements in order to identify the best target configuration for each application that will be migrated to the AWS Cloud.

Planning And Discovery: Based on the data gathered by Citrus Consulting Services Business Analysts, Pre-Sales Consultants and Account Managers during the Assessment Phase, Citrus and the Customer, following Citrus Migration Approach, will define the migration waves basing on priorities and system dependencies.

Design and Validation: Citrus Consulting Services has industrialized the approach for designing the target Cloud environment with standardized landing zone templates to be customized based on specificity of the Customer. Such approach allows Citrus to deliver high quality Landing Zone design with proper care in terms of Identity and Access Management, Security, Network Segregation and Automation and, at the same time, address all specificities of the Customer.

Migrate: Aligned to AWS best practices, Citrus Consulting Services’ Cloud Migration Team consisting of AWS Certified Engineers, Consultants and TAMs, will select and execute the right migration strategy. This includes re-host, re-platform, and re-architect options.

Manage: As the natural continuation of the journey, Citrus Consulting Services offers 24*7*365 – Cloud-Native Managed Services for the complete management of the AWS Workloads and hosted Applications. This enables our customers to focus on there core competencies rather than their IT infrastructure or applications.