Cloud 101 Series: Moving to the Cloud

Part five of a series. 

Cloud Migration Strategy

Here is the process we recommend to make the move:

Discover: Understand the business goals and user needs.

• Define the project’s goals and objectives.
• Understand the key drivers for adoption.
• Explore the pain points for security & governance.
• Develop Use Cases and Proof of Concept candidates.
• Create actionable next steps.

Plan: Develop structure and deliver framework.

• Complete Application and Infrastructure assessments.
• Estimate Total Cost of Ownership (TCO) and Return on Investment (ROI).
• Identify pilot applications for migration.
• Define Reference Architecture and Minimum Viable Cloud.
• Align stakeholders on success criteria.
• Create Cloud Enablement Plan.

Act: Create initial migration and business value definition.

• Build Minimum Viable Cloud.
• Migrate pilot workloads as representative use cases.
• Validate applications and operations on Minimum Viable Cloud.
• Build initial cloud migration team.
• Verify economic model against larger application portfolio.
• Map security, compliance and operational processes.

Optimize: Commercialize cloud program and support Organizational Change Management.

• Build program management structure.
• Implement security and governance controls.
• Mature the Cloud Migration Factory: Tools, Processes, and Playbooks.
• Oversee operations enablement and cloud service management.
• Execute workload and data migration cutovers.
• Enable knowledge transfer and support transition.

This series was originally published on centricconsulting.com

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