Leveraging cloud technologies provides a competitive advantage by focusing on core business problems rather than building and maintaining the infrastructure or foundational services. However, while the desire to take advantage of the cloud is always there and benefits are apparent, the potential migration burden and the unknowns become a blocker. Whether you are moving a handful of applications or thousands, a thorough planning is necessary for a smooth, stable, fast transition. 

Cloud migrations are transformational changes where the focus should be on all three dimensions of the change: toolset, skillset, and mindset. Therefore, every migration stage includes tasks to prepare these dimensions for the next phase. While each business is unique in terms of the specific tasks and duration they need, we can outline a non-comprehensive high-level action plan for migrations as follows:

• Assessment phase

  • 360 Technology and skills assessment

  • Technology stack deep dive

  • Existing languages, tools, software

  • Application inventory and patterns

  • Data inventory and access patterns

  • Security/Compliance/Finance assessment and guidance

  • Network/IO needs

  • Cost/Effort/Value evaluation

  • Automation needs

• Preparation phase

  • Prioritization and grouping

  • Migration strategy mapping

  • Training

  • Reference architectures creation

  • Cross functional cloud transformation central team formation

  • Mobilizing teams and leadership 

• Pilot phase

  • Finding early adopters

  • Cloud environment preparation (dev/test)

  • Security and policy enforcement

  • Account setup and permissions verification

  • Logging and auditing setup

  • Network/Storage/data transfer setup

  • Application migration and functionality and performance tests

  • Communicating findings and shortcomings

  • Resolve issues and iterate

  • Ongoing monitoring and evaluation 

  • Showcasing value

• Execution phase  

  • Prod considerations

  • End-to-end development lifecycle enablement

  • CI/CD preparation

  • Automation tooling

  • High availability deployment considerations

  • Back-up and restore setup

  • Disaster recovery and redundancy setup

  • Static content management and edge locations

  • Logging, metrics, alarms setup

  • Security guards

  • Public access points guards, gateway setup, anomaly detection and alerts

  • Ship to prod, and repeat!