5 min readThe proportion of IT spending shifting to the cloud is accelerating. Over 45% of system infrastructure, infrastructure software, application software, and more are predicted to move from traditional solutions to the cloud by 2024.
Cloud migration, especially backed by the breadth of services offered with AWS, enables you to make data-backed business and strategy decisions. With more comprehensive data insights, you can utilize AWS Managed Services to improve your reliability, security, and elasticity. As your business becomes more cost-effective and efficient, you’ll be able to scale and innovate.
All of these business benefits from cloud start with migration. But what happens if your migration’s progress slows or stalls out? You can begin to lose momentum—or worse—have your executive buy-in wane. Realizing the results from your cloud migration and quantifying and communicating them with stakeholders requires mobilization.
Here’s how to mobilize as you start your migration journey and accelerate the time to realizing significant changes and results.
Where migrations begin
As we discussed in our previous blog post, you need to evaluate your migration readiness.
After that, you must then understand the full scope of your migration plans. Knowing your migration’s scope includes determining the potential risks and preliminary costs, your team’s understanding of cloud and their knowledge gaps, as well as a main migration strategy.
The SoftServe and AWS teams are there to help you prepare your cloud environment and identify any missing parts.
This is known as the “mobilize” phase and it’s split into two stages: Discovery and Execution.
Migration Mobilization Stage 1: Discovery
The Discovery stage starts with a detailed business case preparation. Our SoftServe experts work closely with customers and cross-functional team leaders to align their migration priorities and critical requirements.
We create a custom business case that includes a multi-year plan comparing the TCO for the current on-premises environment with the TCO of any future AWS infrastructure. SoftServe also calculates the overall ROI to give you a better view of the impact and profitability of your migration.
To thoroughly plan each migration phase, our team uses quality attribute workshops. In these workshops, we speak to your business’ cross-functional leaders and migration sponsors to define your organization’s migration strategy.
During these meetings, our experts will set up application requirements, dependencies, and current pain points. This maximizes the benefits you’ll see from your cloud migration for each application.
Having previously defined your workload’s main migration strategy, we will combine it with the information gathered at the workshops. Then our team will adjust and edit the overall migration plan including for each application component’s architecture, dependencies and migration requirements.
We also build a Cloud Center of Excellence (CCoE) at your company dedicated to mobilizing the appropriate resources and leading your organization on its migration journey. Often, the CCoE is a cross-functional team of 3-5 experts responsible for defining and implementing your cloud strategy and knowing best practices and governance. These outcomes will then be used across your organization for the cloud adoption process.
Since your entire organization will be impacted when you migrate to the cloud, SoftServe also provides training sessions and AWS Immersion Days for engineering teams. This last step in the Discovery stage is where our certified AWS engineers lead deep-dive overviews with practical labs for your team. With a better understanding and knowledge of the specific cloud technology your company will be utilizing, your team will be able to handle any future issues.
Migration Mobilization Stage 2: Execution
The Execution stage starts with implementing the Landing Zone (LZ) for your new AWS environment. A comprehensive orchestration framework, AWS LZ provides baselines for multi-account architecture, identity and access management, governance, data security, network design, and logging.
SoftServe’s experts use AWS Control Tower for the majority of LZ deployments. If you have an extremely complex organization or other landing zone customization requirements, we’ve also developed an internal advanced LZ framework.
This stage of the Mobilize phase is where the pilot migration comes to fruition. SoftServe aids your CCoE in migrating a pilot application of one of your workloads, giving them real hands-on migration experience and the confidence to use cloud solutions more extensively.
After this pilot migration, our team can then help plan a full-scale migration. Since the foundation for your migration has already been laid thanks to this mobilization, your full migration will be accelerated. An accelerated migration means you’ll see the business benefits of cloud more quickly, ultimately justifying the entire project.
Post Mobilization Phase
The Mobilization phase is crucial to accelerating your AWS cloud migration. From preparing the business case and conducting team trainings, to laying the AWS environment foundation with the pilot migration, you’ll maximize the benefits of using cloud.
After your mobilization, you’ll have a deeply detailed business plan for your migration. You’ll also have the AWS Landing Zone foundation and environments ready to host your workloads. Thanks to the workshops and Cloud Center of Excellence established and co-led by SoftServe, your operational and engineering teams will be trained and ready to handle the new cloud workloads.
With a pilot workload already running on the AWS environment, you’ll be armed with automation scripts and migration runbooks. The Mobilization phase also leaves you with a tailored migration plan ready to scale across your business.
SoftServe’s extensive cloud and AWS expertise combined with AWS’ 13+ years of helping thousands of organizations successfully migrate to the cloud means you’ll be able to quickly and effectively implement, realize, measure, and communicate the tangible benefits of your cloud migration.
Let’s talk about how SoftServe’s team of AWS cloud experts can mobilize and accelerate your cloud migration.