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 migrate 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 can benefit organizations on their migration journey by 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. At Citrus Consulting, we prioritize pre-migration planning to ensure a smooth transition when moving to the AWS cloud.

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 successful cloud migration plan. At citrus, we perform gap analysis also that helps determine which workloads are healthy and important for moving to the cloud.

Breaking down the AWS Migration Readiness Assessment

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

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

We Identify the current problems your company is facing with its on-premises and calculates 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 estimate migration budget and any operational disruptions that may occur during the shift to AWS.

Select and prioritize First-Mover workloads for AWS migration

At citrus our goal for AWS 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: Tier-1 Workload

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: 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: 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.

In summary, careful preparation and planning are key to a successful AWS migration, and we hope these tips will help you get started on your journey to the AWS cloud.