Why Is the Cloud Migration Discovery Phase so Important?

Why Is the Cloud Migration Discovery Phase so Important?

Cloud migration is a process separated into five stages: discovery phase, cloud assessment phase, proof concept phase, migration phase, and lastly operation phase. In this article, we are focusing on the first stage - the discovery phase. Read on and learn why the cloud migration discovery phase is so important.

Often organizations do not invest enough time into planning and jump into the execution stage; this approach can be very dangerous. You can get away with this approach in specific smaller projects, but we need to be very careful in complex projects like cloud migration.

Cloud migration is a process that affects many departments in the company. It is necessary to invest time into the discovery and assessment phases to avoid unexpected and costly problems.

The cloud migration discovery phase helps us to understand:

• costs structure,
• compliance needs,
• technologies in use,
• dependencies,
• infrastructure needs.

What Is IT Discovery?

Application and infrastructure are rarely static; they change over time. Applications get new features and become more complex; infrastructure evolves. As these changes are introduced, companies rarely document every change and their impact on relationships and dependencies on other parts of your IT environment. This drift from the initial setup to the current state can cause problems during the cloud migration.

We use IT discovery to identify and document the current state of the client's infrastructure, related components, applications, relationships and dependencies.

How Do We Perform IT Discovery?

To perform IT discovery, we use auto or manual discovery. Auto-discovery is a technique where we use agentless auto-discovery tools to map relationships between servers and applications.

The auto-discovery maps relationships across data centers and in the cloud to find relationships that aren't shown in the application's documentation. Additionally, we use monitoring software to discover throughput, latency, CPU, and RAM usage.

Manual discovery provides context and data analysis to the data gathers by tools. In some cases, we only perform manual discovery. The process includes the tasks such as:

• documentation review,
• security review,
• operation process review.

How Does Our Cloud Migration Discovery Process Look Like?

Our discovery process follows six simple steps.

1. Documentation - we set the foundation by collecting various documents that can help us understand your environment (diagrams, contracts, implementation documents).
2. Auto-discovery - we deploy an auto-discovery tool to help us collect a detailed map of relationships between the components in your IT environment. In smaller and better-documented environments, this step is not always necessary.
3. Dependency mapping - we map application dependencies and network flow between serves, storage and other IT assets.
4. Questionanner - we manually collect non-discoverable data about the client's IT environment, such as maintenance windows, security and compliance, availability needs, etc.
5. Workshops/interviews - we perform workshops or single-person interviews to fill the gaps, address known issues, and verify our current findings.
6. Consolidation - we consolidated all gathered data into a single source of truth about the current state of your infrastructure, future needs and other requirements.

Conclusion

Cloud migration is a complex project that affects almost every department in your company. Our cloud migration project structure is based on years of experience working with companies from various industries and sizes. The cloud migration discovery phase is the first phase in your cloud migration journey.

The cloud migration discovery phase is essential for a good foundation for other project phases. We invest a lot of time into understanding your current IT landscape, applications, network, and your future needs and requirements. This way, we have all the inputs needs for the assessment phase.

As AWS Advanced Consulting Partner, we help companies of every industry and size solve their infrastructure problems with cloud migration.

If you want to know more about cloud migration, cloud technology in general, AWS cloud, or you want to try AWS services:

• visit our cloud migration service page;
• give us a call at +385 1 3141 562;
• contact our sales department at sales@heptabit.com.

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