Seamlessly navigate your data center migration by understanding the end-to-end journey

Introduction

Data centre migrations are transformational undertakings that touch every aspect of an organization’s IT infrastructure, operations, and potentially its entire business model. Unlike traditional technology upgrades, cloud migrations represent fundamental shifts in how organizations approach computing, storage, security, and technological innovation. Maximizing cloud value while minimizing disruption requires a holistic approach to be taken that includes enabling teams, implementing business processes, validating operational capabilities, and more. Focusing on the end-to-end journey and treating the project as a large-scale digital transformation initiative is crucial for ensuring successful, sustainable, and strategic cloud adoption that delivers tangible business value.

In this blog post we’ll outline a typical data centre migration journey based on our experience in supporting thousands of enterprise customers, leveraging the AWS migration methodology framework. While reading this blog post, we recommend evaluating your migration project against each component. This will indicate the overall health of your project and enable focus areas to be determined.

Typical data centre cloud migration journey

Training & Enablement
Training and enabling your IT and business teams is an important component of a cloud migration project. While AWS Transform removes the need to invest countless hours upskilling your teams in becoming migration experts as it serves as your trusted virtual advisor, it’s important to ensure your teams have sufficient AWS knowledge and experience to effectively operate migrated workloads and maximize cloud value. We recommend being intentional about training your teams as it’s a crucial step and can take many months to implement. The AWS Learning Needs Analysis is a great place to start, it’ll survey your employees about their cloud skills and identify areas of need with a customized learning plan.

Enterprise Transformation
To maximize cloud value you may need to transform your organization and ways of working. For example, aligning cloud strategy to strategic priorities, gaining alignment between IT and Business stakeholders, updating your operating model to align with cloud best practices, embedding a digital culture across your organization, and implementing cloud finops best practices. It’s important to be intentional and proactive about these pieces to maximize cloud value for the long-term.

Determine Migration Scope & Strategy
Determining the scope of your migration project is crucial to facilitate all subsequent stages. While this is fairly straightforward for some customers as they are migrating every asset within their data centre, others often use the migration project as an opportunity to rationalise a portfolio of applications which requires a deeper analysis. To support this, we recommend leveraging our 7R migration strategies.

Assess Organizational Readiness
Assessing your organizational readiness during the initial stages of your migration project enables you to create a targeted plan for the components that are generally slower to implement. We recommend talking to your AWS Partner or Account Manager about a Migration Readiness Assessment (MRA) to indentify areas of strength and weakness from a cloud-readiness perspective, and build an action plan to resolve any identified gaps.

Discover In-Scope Workloads
It’s common for customers to not have a good understanding of every workload within their data centre, the underlying infrastructure for each workload (servers, databases, shared storage, load balancers, etc), the dependencies a workload has across the wider estate, and licensing requirements. In this scenario you may need to perform a discovery phase to ensure your migration teams have the data required. Performing this phase correctly can significantly accelerate your migration velocity in the later stages, and AWS Transform Assessments can simplify this step by analyzing your IT environment to provide data-driven insights and actionable recommendations.

Create a Migration Business Case
The value of cloud extends beyond Total Cost of Ownership (TCO) reduction. AWS customers also see significant improvements in other areas, including staff productivity, operational resilience and business agility. The migration business case stage helps align stakeholders across the organization and is a great opportunity to re-evaluate your directional migration strategy aligns with your organization goals. We recommend reading the Business Value on AWS guide and leveraging AWS Transform for detailed financial modelling of your workloads to maximize cost savings.

Implement AWS Foundations
Before you can migrate workloads to the cloud, you’ll need to implement your AWS foundations. This includes creating a well-architected AWS Landing Zone, establishing network connectivity, and building the shared services your applications require. The Landing Zone Accelerator on AWS solution deploys a foundational set of capabilities that is designed to align with AWS best practices and multiple global compliance frameworks. With this AWS Solution, you can better manage and govern your multi-account environment that have highly-regulated workloads and complex compliance requirements.

Implement Migration Foundations
Implementing robust migration foundations such as a migration plan, migration patterns, and migration automation is crucial when transitioning your data centre to AWS and enables your project to scale in an efficient and structured approach. These components outline what workloads will be migrated, by when, and how they’ll be migrated. AWS Transform removes the guess work from cloud migration decisions with actionable insights that help guide your migration strategy and help you confidently plan your migration based on your in-scope workloads.

Migration & Modernization Execution
This is the stage where all the previous aspects are put to the test, leveraging the patterns and automation created in the previous step. Don’t be afraid to revisit previous components if challenges are identified (e.g. additional discovery activities if you don’t have enough data to migrate pilot workloads or re-evaluate the training approach if skill-gaps are identified). We recommend starting with an AWS Experience-Based Accelerator (EBA) to gain momentum, and using AWS Transform to leverage AI agents for automating complex tasks (such as generating infrastructure as code, application code analysis, decomposition, refactoring, validation, and deployment).

Functional & Non-Functional Testing
While functional and non-functional testing of a workload is generally required before production cutovers, the volume of servers being migrated can pose project level challenges. Consider creating a holistic testing strategy as soon as possible that outlines the priorities, scenarios to be tested, and where it applies. For example, applying a higher priority to business-critical workloads, and a ‘fix-forward’ approach for non-critical workloads to balance business continuity and migration velocity.

Validate Security & Compliance Requirements
Security and compliance are not checkboxes but strategic imperatives for all enterprises. Validating security requirements are met is an important component of all cloud adoption journeys. If you haven’t already done so, we recommend checking out AWS Security Hub for centralizing your security checks and alerts, and assessing your internal governance program as it transforms from on-premises to the cloud with the AWS Shared Responsibility Model. If you have compliance requirements such as PCI DSS or HIPAA, AWS Security Assurance Services (AWS SAS) provides access to experienced auditors combined with AWS technical depth to support with your compliance requirements.

Validate Application Resilience & Operational Readiness
Your data centre likely contains mission critical workloads that must be designed with high-availability in mind. When migrating these workloads, we recommend performing well-architected reviews to validate the workload implementation, and application resilience assessments to validate the technology, people, and process aspects align to your resilience objectives. This could include delivering simulated game-days where the end-to-end scenario is tested (monitoring, alerting, response, remediation, etc).

Operate Migrated Workloads
Each migrated workload needs to be operated by a team with AWS knowledge and experience to ensure smooth operations. We recommend planning this phase in advance and creating a migration plan that enables your team to gradually build their experience, such as starting with low priority and low complexity workloads. Alternatively, AWS Managed Services (AMS) can provide interim operational support to enable an accelerated migration timeline and free your teams from day-to-day cloud operations, such as monitoring, incident and problem management, patching, backups, and security management.

Decommission Source Infrastructure
Many business cases are dependent on the source infrastructure being decommissioned, but you’ll be surprised at how many customers don’t proactively plan this stage of the project. We recommend ensuring your migration plan aligns to the data centre divestiture requirements, and implementing an efficient transition from the migration team to the decommissioning team to simplify this phase.

Conclusion

This blog post provided an overview of a typical customer journey when migrating a data centre to the cloud. By understanding each component of the migration journey, you can better minimize disruption and maximize the strategic value of your cloud transformation.

We recommend assessing your data center migration project against the components outlined in the blog post and sharing the findings with your AWS Account Manager for recommendations based on our experience migrating thousands of enterprise customers to the cloud.