Cloud Migration
Make your infrastructure change as fast as you do
“Cloud Computing” builds upon the standard datacenter architecture model but abstracts away the core computing, storage, and network concerns of infrastructure management as a set of separate and programmatically manageable resources from the applications running on them. By decoupling the management of applications from supporting infrastructure, greater velocity and resilience are more efficiently obtained for both.
Our Approach
1. Discovery
2-4 Weeks
2. Pilot
4-6 Weeks
3. Roadmap
1-2 weeks
4. Migrate
2-4 Week Iteration
5. Optimize
2-4 weeks
1. Discovery - 2-4 weeks
Begins with a 2-3 day workshop for engagement leaders and ends with a reference solution architecture and actionable plan for validating the approach in the pilot phase.
-
- Business Analysis – Why are we moving to the cloud? How do we measure ROI? What risks and/or challenges need to be acknowledged?
- Gap Analysis – Inventory current platform architecture, applications, tooling, processes, and expertise. Facilitate the identification and consensus building of a shared problem-set. Align with business drivers and model ROI.
POC Architecture – Create a reference solution architecture which portrays the ideal end-state incorporating the concerns of operational visibility, lifecycle management, and technology providers. Identify lighthouse application or environment to serve as the initial POC and its s
2. Pilot - 4-6 weeks
The target for POC should represent the most common type of application of the platform, including sensitive data, but is not a foundational dependency of other applications. The pilot phase should produce not only the architecture, but the application lifecycle management tools and processes.
-
- Automation – Setup infrastructure-as-code, orchestration, configuration management, artifact management, and continuous integration systems.
- Application – Automate the deployment of the lighthouse application.
- Automation – Setup infrastructure-as-code, orchestration, configuration management, artifact management, and continuous integration systems.
Operational Visibility – Setup operational visibility to express component topology in dashboards and alerting.
3. Roadmap - 1-2 weeks
Reviews or revises the documented platform topology including an inventory of applications and their components and operational requirements. These are translated to roadmap milestones and are prioritized by risk, value, and effort.
-
- Review and revise readiness assessment assumptions as needed.
- Roadmap – Create an iterative roadmap of phased groups of applications until migration objectives are complete.
- Staffing Plan – Identify key resources that will be needed for Data, DevOps, Development, CloudOps, Security, and Product Owner roles across organizations.
- Review and revise readiness assessment assumptions as needed.
4. Migrate - 2-4 weeks each iteration
Typical SaaS application migrations range from six months to a year. (12-24 iterations)
-
- Infrastructure – Identify architecture and provision infrastructure.
- Application – Setup application lifecycle management automation.
- Data – Migrate data and tune fault tolerance options.
- Operations – Draft and train on runbooks, test and monitor functionality alerting procedures.
- Migrate! – Cutover production
Repeat until done
5. Optimize - 2-4 weeks
Optimization is part of the handoff process for a migrated application. During this phase, we confirm that the fully migrated application meets all requirements and is easily maintained in the long term.
-
- Cost & Utilization – Determine utilization and right-size environment.
- Capacity – Enable elasticity automation for high traffic or ephemeral activity events.
Availability – Diversify geographical presence. Draft and test disaster recovery and business continuity procedures.
Our Approach
1. Discovery
2-4 Weeks
1. Discovery - 2-4 weeks
Begins with a 2-3 day workshop for engagement leaders and ends with a reference solution architecture and actionable plan for validating the approach in the pilot phase.
-
- Business Analysis – Why are we moving to the cloud? How do we measure ROI? What risks and/or challenges need to be acknowledged?
- Gap Analysis – Inventory current platform architecture, applications, tooling, processes, and expertise. Facilitate the identification and consensus building of a shared problem-set. Align with business drivers and model ROI.
POC Architecture – Create a reference solution architecture which portrays the ideal end-state incorporating the concerns of operational visibility, lifecycle management, and technology providers. Identify lighthouse application or environment to serve as the initial POC and its success criteria. Create a backlog which delineates work to complete the POC.
2. Pilot
4-6 Weeks
2. Pilot - 4-6 weeks
The target for POC should represent the most common type of application of the platform, including sensitive data, but is not a foundational dependency of other applications. The pilot phase should produce not only the architecture, but the application lifecycle management tools and processes.
-
- Automation – Setup infrastructure-as-code, orchestration, configuration management, artifact management, and continuous integration systems.
- Application – Automate the deployment of the lighthouse application.
- Automation – Setup infrastructure-as-code, orchestration, configuration management, artifact management, and continuous integration systems.
Operational Visibility – Setup operational visibility to express component topology in dashboards and alerting.
3. Roadmap
1-2 weeks
3. Roadmap - 1-2 weeks
Reviews or revises the documented platform topology including an inventory of applications and their components and operational requirements. These are translated to roadmap milestones and are prioritized by risk, value, and effort.
-
- Review and revise readiness assessment assumptions as needed.
- Roadmap – Create an iterative roadmap of phased groups of applications until migration objectives are complete.
- Staffing Plan – Identify key resources that will be needed for Data, DevOps, Development, CloudOps, Security, and Product Owner roles across organizations.
- Review and revise readiness assessment assumptions as needed.
4. Migrate
2-4 Week Iteration
4. Migrate - 2-4 weeks each iteration
Typical SaaS application migrations range from six months to a year. (12-24 iterations)
-
- Infrastructure – Identify architecture and provision infrastructure.
- Application – Setup application lifecycle management automation.
- Data – Migrate data and tune fault tolerance options.
- Operations – Draft and train on runbooks, test and monitor functionality alerting procedures.
- Migrate! – Cutover production
Repeat until done
5. Optimize
2-4 weeks
5. Optimize - 2-4 weeks
Optimization is part of the handoff process for a migrated application. During this phase, we confirm that the fully migrated application meets all requirements and is easily maintained in the long term.
-
- Cost & Utilization – Determine utilization and right-size environment.
- Capacity – Enable elasticity automation for high traffic or ephemeral activity events.
Availability – Diversify geographical presence. Draft and test disaster recovery and business continuity procedures.
Why Cloud?
Functional Outcomes
- Availability – Single points of failure (SPOFs) are more easily mitigated through rapidly provisioned, geographically diverse infrastructure. Orchestration for systems reliability and fault tolerance is more accessible.
- Performance – Infrastructure automatically and elastically scales to demand based on any metric, including processor utilization and/or response times.
- Velocity – Changes to both applications and infrastructure exist in version-controlled releases and are automatically deployable after automated test pipelines confirm passing functional, performance and security requirements.
- Efficiency – Environments are sized according to the need and scale with changes in demand. The cost per transaction grows flatter over time.
- Leverage – Since infrastructure is easily provisioned, the business pivots to application architecture which best align and support its features and functions. Additionally, engineers select more familiar tools and services.
- Security – Security patches are easy to deploy. Vulnerability and information sensitivity scans are automated. Change logging and audit trails are readily accessible and support compliances.
Business Outcomes
- Income Augmentation & Retention – Features are quickly released to customers enabling more rapid validation of product hypotheses. Outages which negatively affect revenue are less frequent. Brand loyalty grows predictably over time.
- Expense Reduction & Optimization – The cost of time waiting for resources or performing manual activities is reduced. Costs of hardware maintenance and refreshes…