1 > Assess

Your applications and data estate. Create the plan.

Assessing Your Estate

In the first phase of cloud migration, two functions happen in parallel.

The first is to create the necessary oversight, governance and planning bodies if they do not already exist. This team, often called a Cloud Center of Excellence (CCoE), starts by defining the core business goals of the migration.

The CCoE is multidisciplinary, usually consisting of IT professionals from engineering, architecture, information security, compliance and finance – all of whom have important input to the migration plan and its steps.

Typical business goals for a migration may include:

Migrate to the cloud to close existing costly data centers
Migrate specific applications to experiment with new technologies without significant risk
Consolidate data to develop AI models
Migrate the entire estate, starting with the least-critical applications
Standardize on AWS
Reduce total cost of ownership (TCO) to realize cost efficiencies
Increase agility and reduce time to market

Once the goals are clearly defined, the CCoE can progress to:

Define the migration plan and roadmap with milestones along the way
Assign accountable individuals for the migration tasks
Define cost and date targets
Provide ongoing reporting to senior management

Assessing Your Estate (cont'd)

An accurate and swift analysis of your applications, data and infrastructure is key to migration success

Along with the creation of the CCoE, the first phase of a migration consists of analyzing the IT estate, that is, developing the inventory of applications and data to be migrated.

This workstream typically involves examining the configuration management database (CMDB), the portfolio management database (if present), as well as conducting detailed interviews with client experts.

Here is where we can leverage our AI/Run platform.

Our AI/RUN Portfolio Assessment model can deliver a comprehensive dataset describing applications, data, the infrastructure they require (operating system, server size, etc.) and their relative maturity.

It analyzes the application estate to determine the optimal migration strategy, automatically discovers and maps application dependencies for smoother transitions, and identifies technology components. It then suggests AWS equivalent services for those components with compatibility scoring.

But the assessment phase doesn't end there. We also assess your data estate, advising IT teams which databases to move, where to move them and when to move and cut over. Our AI/Run component migVisor analyzes databases to determine dependencies and data lineage and updates ETLs using automation.

Our experts can also help determine whether to migrate to a proprietary, VM-based database for maximum on-premises compatibility (such as Oracle@AWS), a less-expensive open-source cloud-hosted database (like MySQL) or a more flexible NoSQL database (such as the AWS Dynamo DB).

Estimating and optimizing costs

Using the information gathered using our analysis and assessment tools, we can create a picture of the estimated costs of your applications and data in AWS and identify opportunities for optimizing those costs. Our AI/RUN tools deliver a comprehensive view of the roadmap, plus any pre-migration remediations required.