What is the Migration Framework?

The migration framework is an approach to migrating and modernizing in the cloud that has a proven, reliable track record based on many projects, hours, and accumulated expertise. The migration framework’s reliability has been proven by our own project success and thousands of AWS’. It is continually being refined and improved with real-world experience.

The 3 Phases of the Migration Framework

Phase 1: Assess

We start by assessing these areas of your organization:

• Your Business
• Your Future Platform
• Your People
• What Governance is Needed?
• How Will You Operate It?
• Security
• Scope of Migration

If this sounds like a lot, IT IS! At CleanSlate, we are intentionally thorough. And if you’re surprised that it isn’t overly technical, you are not alone!

It is very important to align future decisions and phases with the contextual business direction your cloud platform will support. There is much more to successfully operating an IT platform in the cloud than running it on a server somewhere else.

There are three kinds of engagements involved during this phase:

1) Business Case Total Cost of Ownership (TCO)

2) Migration Readiness Assessment (MRA)

3) Optimized Licensed Assessment (OLA)

Each of these engagements helps us make collaborative, data-informed recommendations based on your unique organization. We employ tooled analysis in conjunction with seasoned experts. Often, real-world usage differs from ancestral corporate perceptions. Coupled with an Optimized Licensed Assessment (OLA), you can understand licensing gaps on your current platform, and plan for cost optimization in your future home. It is not uncommon for us to end an assessment knowing more about a client’s environment than even they do.

Phase 2: Mobilize

Our goal during the Mobilize phase is to remedy the gaps we discovered during phase one and rapidly build a prototype of your future cloud home that validates your organization’s roadmap.

At a high level, the Mobilize phase involves these types of activities:

Conversations for migration planning focus on whether we should rehost, replatform, repurchase, refactor, retain, or rewrite (also known as the “6 R’s”). Understanding and having a strategy for your workloads compromises a roadmap we follow and plan around.

The Mobilize phase includes building a working example of workload migration from old to new. This proves out the approach and underlying technical platform, giving real-world experience to clients and a chance to work out any kinks that remain. Not only that, we validate the approach against best practices in what’s called a “Well-Architected Review” (WAR).

Phase 3: Migrate & Modernize

During the Migrate & Modernize phase we accelerate migration at scale. We quickly move production workloads into the cloud and modernize applications from their current state to future state. We are in execution mode.

We lift-and-shift replatformed workloads. We rewrite applications for modernization. We tweak others. Some get retired completely, while others are replaced or repurchased with solutions on the new platform.

Altogether, these three phases comprise our Migration Framework.

Each journey is unique yet follows this same approach. Many times, customers are already convinced they should move to a cloud platform, so they are eager to get started and jump right into implementation. They don’t want to undertake an assessment – they want to start moving stuff immediately.

So, you may be wondering, why start an assessment if I’ve already decided to migrate and believe that I am are ready? Stayed tuned as we delve into this topic in our next blog.