Migration assessment tools – Leveraging the Cloud for Digital Transformation
Migration assessment tools
You don’t have to reinvent the wheel as you migrate your workloads and projects from your current environment to the cloud. As you can imagine, many others have already started this journey. AWS and third-party vendors offer various tools to facilitate this migration to facilitate this process. A few examples of services and tools that are worth exploring are as follows:
- AWS Migration Hub: AWS Migration Hub is a central repository that can be used to keep track of a migration project
- AWS Application Discovery Service: AWS Application Discovery Service automates the discovery and inventory tracking of different infrastructure resources, such as servers and dependencies.
- AWS Migration Pattern Library: This is a collection of migration templates and design patterns that can assist in the comparison of migration options and alternatives.
- CloudEndure Migration: CloudEndure Migration is a product offered by AWS that simplifies cloud migration by automating many of the steps necessary to migrate to the cloud.
- AWS Data Migration Service: This service can facilitate data migration from your on-premises databases to the cloud, for example, into Amazon RDS.
This by no means is not a comprehensive list. Many other AWS and third-party services can assist in your migration. You can complete the list by visiting the AWS migration page link here- https://aws.amazon.com/free/migration/.Now that you have reviewed the different ways to migrate to the cloud let’s understand a little bit better why you might want to migrate to the cloud to begin with. You will gain this understanding by learning about the concept of digital transformation. Let’s now dive deeper into how organizations leverage digital transformation using the cloud model.
Implementing a digital transformation program
In the previous section, you spent some time understanding AWS cloud migration strategy. In this section, you will learn how to perform the transformation from legacy on-premises technologies into the cloud.As you can imagine, this can be a difficult exercise, especially for large enterprises that have a long history of using old technologies and have made significant investments in them. Deciding to start migrating applications and on-premises services to the cloud is not a decision that can be made lightly. A complete migration will likely take years and potentially can cost millions of dollars just on migration, transformation, and testing costs.For this reason, important decisions need to be made along the way. Some of the most critical decisions that need to be made are as follows:
- Should you perform the bare minimum amount of tasks to achieve the migration, or do you want to use this change as an opportunity to refactor, enhance, and optimize our services? Doing the bare minimum (only migrating our workloads to the cloud) will mean that any problems and deficiencies in the current environment will be brought over to the new environment.
- Should the migration be purely technological, or should you use this opportunity to transform our current business processes? You could take this opportunity to thoroughly assess how your organization does business today and figure out how you can improve it. It will potentially create efficiencies, cut costs, and increase customer satisfaction. However, this option will inherently have a higher upfront cost, and it may or may not work.
In this section, you will start learning the primary strategies for migration to the cloud and weigh up some of the options.
