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CLOUD MIGRATION CHECKLIST

IS YOUR BUSINESS

THE CLOUD?PREPARED FOR

powered by AM Data Service

AM I READY FOR THE CLOUD?

At some point in your life you have probably dreamed about having the power to fly through the skies like a bird; held aloft by wind and moving through the air with intention. On the other side of that empowering and hopeful dream of flight is another dream that you may be familiar with, the gut-wrenching terror-inducing dream of endless falling. Although it is a strange parallel to draw, an organization’s decision to move services or servers to the cloud often creates two opposing viewpoints. In one camp, there is the view of moving to the cloud as “think how great it could be” and the other viewpoint, which embodies a more cautious “think how wrong it could go.”

The truth is that both views are equally valid and is one of the biggest factors we have to address in our cloud consulting practice. The cloud migration process can be painful without proper planning, execution, and testing.

We believe that Education, Understanding, Goals and Preparation can help to bring together these contrasting viewpoints and help organizations achieve a more accurate assessment of the process and potential and a highly positive outcome.

This checklist will help you understand what is involved with the process of migrating to the cloud, how to establish tangible (and achievable) goals and what preparation is required to properly evaluate whether the cloud is right for you.

First, let us tear the Band-Aid off - a cloud-hosted environment is not suitable for every organization. I know we are a cloud-hosting provider and the generally accepted view for an organization that sells something, is that they take every opportunity to sell it. However, we are different and the simple fact remains that “The Cloud” does not suit all business needs for all businesses.

Many factors can influence the viability of a cloud offering for a business. It is important that your organization work through its self-evaluation of technology requirements, service provider logistics and real world (people) logistics.

Some simple questions to think through would be:

1. Do you have any mobility requirements or are you seeking that capability? (remote workers, offsite access requirements, etc.)

2. Do you have consistent and reliable power and internet connections at your business? a. Can workers currently continue to perform work from remote locations if your

organization loses power or internet? b. Are you looking for remote connection capability?

3. Are you running an application or business critical software that is not designed to work for the cloud, often applications which are very demanding on compute and graphics resources (Such as CAD applications) require deeper consideration before making a cloud migration determination.

4. Does your organization have compliance requirements or specific data access-control, which may require additional evaluations?

5. Do you currently have well-structured and effective data security processes in place? 6. Do you have applications that require integration?

BEFORE YOU START THE JOURNEY

Starting any infrastructure or migration project requires a clear vision of your existing environment and the destination for the project. Many organizations look to the cloud as they are near a required or needed hardware refresh, and are evaluating the benefits and drawbacks of both options. Part of the checklist below helps organizations to compare the continuing Op-Ex cost for a cloud environment when compared to the larger Cap-Ex costs associated with the replacement of internal systems.

What follows is a series of important steps and decision-making milestones needed to accomplish your goals.

PLANNING AND ASSESSING

1. Conduct an initial evaluation of the organizations overall readiness to complete a cloud migration project (with these questions taking priority):

a. How much of the overall project does the organization have internal expertise to manage? This would include the initial migration, as well as ongoing management and an ability to engineer future solutions for a cloud environment.

b. If internal skillsets are lacking, how can these skillsets be made-up for by enlisting the help of a third-party consultative organization to assist you? What does this third party cost the organization?

c. Assess your current infrastructure and determine what applications could be impacted, positively and negatively, by migrating them to the cloud. The following items should be explored more thoroughly;

i. Map out your business applications and any systems (environment) requirements and dependencies

ii. Calculate operational costs for existing on-premises infrastructure: 1. Physical Hardware Costs (Servers, Switching, Cabling) 2. Software Licensing and Agreements 3. Labor (Staffed, Contracted) 4. Facilities (Power, Physical Footprint, Disaster Recovery) 5. Recruitment and Retainment 6. Training

iii. Identify Security and Compliance Requirements 1. Facility/Cloud Compliance Certifications 2. Software-based Access Control 3. Private networking considerations 4. Encryption, both on data access and data at rest 5. Disaster Recovery

d. Identify your CTQ (Critical-To-Quality) metrics

i. Acceptable availability metrics (with current records on actual internal downtime)

ii. Response target, and actual response timeline for any experienced downtime iii. Recovery Time Objective – how long should/does it take to resume operations

in the event of critical failure? 2. Determine how much risk is acceptable to the organization, and if current operations would

benefit or be hindered by leveraging a cloud solution. Both headline risk and underlying risk should be highlighted, for example: What would the organization do in the event of an off-premises data breach, or some other failure at our select cloud vendor? Review with selected consultant if needed.

3. Identify and engage with team members who would be involved in migration efforts. Due to the drastic nature of this undertaking, securing buy in from the relevant parties will ensure a much smoother transition in leveraging the cloud. Involving these team members during this critical assessment phase will also highlight anything about the existing on premises environment that could cause potential issues down the line.

4. Assess your existing on premise or collocated applications and services, specifically notating the following metrics and specifications;

a. Application or Service Role. What does this application do within your organization, and how critical is it to ongoing operations?

b. Dependencies. What applications and services, or specific business processes, depend on this applications availability? What will be affected before, during and after a proposed migration?

c. Access and Logistics. How do your departments and end users currently interface with the application? Will off-premise secured network access be required to fully support this application in the cloud?

d. Resource utilization. Properly sizing your cloud instances will ensure that you fully leverage the cost benefits of cloud computing. Determining usage statistics, such as peak load, may allow you to more appropriately scale the instances to fit your load profile. Look for things like:

i. RAM Usage ii. CPU usage and utilization

iii. Required Storage and IOPs/throughput iv. Network resource utilization v. Peak and trough resource requirements.

Once you have gathered the information about your team, the existing environment, the access and security needs for the organization, application in and any compliance and security requirements, you can identify the corresponding migration strategy for your applications.

DESIGN THE SOLUTION

With the planning and assessment phase now complete, we now move on to designing the appropriate cloud solution for your environment. In this design phase, we’ll tackle translating the information garnered from your planning and assessment of your existing infrastructure into functional requirements for your cloud migration.

1. Prepare detailed design requirements. Notate from your previous exploratory work explicit dependencies and resource utilization. This should include the following:

a. Network Diagrams, both internal and external, detailing end user access points b. Application Diagrams, including Venn diagrams that highlight dependencies and may

help illustrate potential overlaps in application usefulness. c. Determine what of your assessed systems meet your metrics for cost control and

availability within the cloud, remove all others from your design requirements. d. Compile a final list of servers, applications, and services that need to be available post

move. 2. With your detailed design requirements in hand, organize internal teams as necessary to have

them detail the migration process. Cover at least the following: a. Identify what elements of the environment are most easily migrated, without the need

for re-engineering the platform. b. What is the ideal application/service order for cloud migration? c. What applications would suffer least from the added latency of a hybrid deployment? d. What teams have the most available resources to effect a migration of their managed

service or application? 3. After determining the detailed migration process with your internal teams, set out to create a

schedule with your planning team, and integrate all documentation from internal teams regarding their specific applications. This will give you a migration schedule and per-team deliverables that you can leverage to ensure your migration goes as planned.

Select and Prepare your Cloud Environment

With the planning phase complete, you may now choose your cloud vendor. Ensuring that your cloud vendor meets your specific checklist requirements for data security and compliance, as well as features and scalability will be critical to future growth in the cloud. Two of the main points of contention when selecting a cloud vendor is flexibility and ongoing support. The Cosmos Cloud, for example, provides nearly limitless scalability, and offers 24x7x365 infrastructure and customer support.

After selecting your cloud vendor, begin to setup your environment. This will include configuration of transit between your local environments, the cloud environment, and any end user access points highlighted during your cloud migration discovery phase. Setting up firewalls, and security policies, will ensure that your managed cloud environment is fully compliant with both internal and regulatory requirements.

Begin your Migration

With your assessment, planning, diagraming, scheduling, and setup completed, the migration may now commence. Your cloud environment should be fully prepared with networking, security, and vulnerability testing complete. Per your schedule with internal teams, each team responsible for a migration should begin on their set schedule. Depending on the size and scope of the migration your teams will undertake, this process can take anywhere from a few days to a few months. During this time, appropriate contingency plans should be in place should the migration take longer than expected, or certain unforeseen events occur that delay or cancel an ongoing migration.

During this phase, critical data is in transit from your local environments to a remote cloud. Special care should be taken to ensure that encryption is used (something that should be covered under the cloud environment pre-configuration), and that you verify data integrity both in transit and at migration completion. Depending on the application, your teams may be employing either a partial migration or full migration, and may in some cases be rebuilding application servers from scratch on the new environment. This will be an ideal time to ensure that server sprawl is addressed in a permanent way, providing you an excellent opportunity to reduce both cost and complexity.

Enjoy your cloud environment!

With your migration complete, you have enabled your business to operate in a flexible, virtually limitless environment, reducing CapEx and complexity in the process. The cloud provides many opportunities for growth, cost savings, and scalability that are simply out of reach for most on-premise deployments.

We hope this checklist has been helpful to you in determining the right pathway to the cloud for your organization. Here at Cosmos, we are experts at helping our customers migrate from local environments to a complete cloud environment. If you find this checklist helpful, but require more information, please don’t hesitate to contact us today!