5 Key Steps for a Successful AWS Cloud Migration

Did you know that migrating to Amazon Web Services (AWS) results in an average 62% increase in infrastructure management efficiency? (IDC) Or that organizations who migrate to AWS save an average of 31% in infrastructure costs? (IDC) With impressive statistics like these, it’s no wonder that organizations across Canada are migrating and modernizing their infrastructures, databases and applications on AWS.

However, cloud migration can come with challenges and many organizations fall victim to common pitfalls along the way. In order to improve your chances of a successful migration project, there are a few key areas in which organizational alignment is essential, especially for large-scale migrations.

If you’re considering a migration to AWS, take a look at the following steps which briefly outline the areas that require organizational alignment during the AWS migration process. At the end of this guide, you will learn more about how OpsGuru, a Carbon60 company, can help you overcome these challenges to de-risk and accelerate your migration process.

1. Know Your Estate

The first step of your migration process involves developing a workload inventory that includes all the virtual machines and servers to be considered for migration. Without a clear understanding of the scope of the migration, you’re likely to underestimate your migration budget and timeline.

OpsGuru Activated Solution: Workload Inventory

2. Understand Your Licensed Liabilities

The next challenge is understanding the licensing costs or operating limitations of the third-party software (such as Oracle, Windows, SAP, and OpenText) governing your system or applications. Licenses and commercial agreements aren’t always straightforward but a failure to understand them can cost your organization time and money.

OpsGuru Activated Solution: Optimization and License Assessment (OLA)

3. Architect for Where You Are & Where You Want to Be

When engineering your cloud architecture, it’s crucial to engineer a right-size solution that is tailored to your current business needs and future business goals. Overengineering your solution can be unnecessarily costly for your organization.

OpsGuru Activated Solution: Migration Readiness Assessment and High-Level Planning

4. Understand the True Cost of Ownership

Next, understanding the true cost of your migration based on your expected utilization of resources is important to help you budget accordingly. This might include the following costs in addition to your cloud invoices:

• Compute and storage costs
• Network costs
• Labour costs
• Support costs
• Operating system costs

Without a clear understanding of the true cost of ownership, cost optimization can be difficult and cost overruns are a risk.

OpsGuru Activated Solution: Total Cost of Ownership Analysis / Right Pricing

5. Execute the Migration Strategy

Finally, it’s time to execute your AWS cloud migration strategy. In this step, it’s important to align your migration strategy with your business to maintain momentum throughout the migration; continuing alignment and making the necessary investments in foundations. A migration strategy that doesn’t account for these items is likely to fail, due to misalignment of your team’s capabilities and operational practices.

OpsGuru Activated Solution: Migration Acceleration Program (MAP) – Assess, Mobilize, Migrate & Modernize

How to Overcome the Challenges of a Successful Migration

Cloud adoption comes with many benefits including higher scalability, flexibility and business agility. It can also help you boost innovation and drive your organizational transformation to meet changing demands.

Although organizational alignment is a critical first step of your AWS migration journey, it’s also essential to have an AWS Consulting Partner by your side. As you’ve seen in the previous sections, each of these cloud migration steps comes with its own challenges. That’s why having a partner to help you throughout your cloud migration journey is key.

As the AWS 2021 Canada Consulting Partner of the Year, OpsGuru has experience with multiple successful migrations and we’re proud to offer proven solutions to help you leverage best practices and take full advantage of the AWS environment.

To learn more, contact us today.