Companies that are looking to modernize existing business applications often realize the best way to do so is to migrate them to the cloud. By doing so, you can improve agility, performance, and cost savings by moving all, or a key subset, of your workloads to the cloud. 

However, many companies struggle to develop the right staff, tools, and processes to migrate quickly and cost-efficiently. To prepare for your cloud migration, start by understanding the standard AWS migration process. AWS divides the process into the following five phases:

1. 1. Migration Preparation & Business Planning – leverage the AWS Cloud Adoption Framework (CAF) to break down the process in 6 key focus areas: Business, People, Governance, Platform, Security, & Operations
   2. Portfolio Discovery & Planning – selecting the right applications for migration is both art and science. A combination of the right data and the right expertise can help you understand your current infrastructure, determine which applications to include in the first wave of migration, choose a migration strategy, and decide how to architect and migrate.
   3. Design – This can be tactical, but complex: what will your infrastructure look like on AWS? Which instance types should you use, and in which configurations? Which Reserved Instances should you purchase to maximize your investments? The ultimate goal of the design phase is to deliver a target reference architecture that is approved by all stakeholders identified in Step 1.
   4. Migration & Validation – The next step is purely technical: your team must build the approved AWS architecture and migrate applications and data to the target architecture.
   5. Operate & Optimize – The key to long-term success on the AWS platform is ongoing optimization. During the Business Planning phase, you should have identified the key teams that will manage the AWS environment(s) on an ongoing basis. Relying on AWS experts, like Logicworks, can help reduce the burden of around-the clock management on internal teams.

The process of migrating existing applications to AWS is complex and often involves stakeholders from every part of an organization. Therefore, it’s important to spend time upfront to acknowledge that cloud migration is not just an IT project — it affects many different groups, and often requires a close collaboration between finance, compliance, product, systems, and other teams. 

If you’re ready to take the next steps in planning your migration, find out how Logicworks can help simplify the process of migrating assets from your data center to the AWS cloud. Logicworks Migration Services enable you to efficiently assess and model workloads for migration and then manage and optimize your infrastructure for cost, usage, performance, and security once they are running on the cloud. This helps reduce complexity and move faster.

Learn more about how Logicworks can help you with your cloud strategy and ongoing support. Schedule time to meet with a AWS migration expert here.