Your guide to AWS cloud migration
Here are three things you need to have in place.
Oct 15, 2019 | By Chiragh Qureshi and Jason Radolec
Looking to migrate your apps and services to the cloud? While companies, big and small, are making the move to transform their business through cloud computing, the process can be challenging without the right planning. As a cloud enablement partner and AWS Advanced Consulting Partner, we’ve learned the top three critical elements for starting your cloud migration off on the right foot.
1. Center of Excellence
A Cloud Center of Excellence (CCOE) is a must for any organization that wishes to have some part of their business in the cloud. Your CCOE should be created before you even begin any part of the migration process, since its responsibility is building a framework for your cloud operations and governing its IT infrastructure.
To start, we recommend building a small team of five or six people comprising developers, network engineers, system administrators and operations—or even a few people outside of the typical “IT” experience. At first, your team should only focus on a few intentional goals or KPIs to get the ball rolling and should be able to execute and learn from failures to iterate quickly. Starting with the right people will ensure the foundation of your CCOE is strong—and scalable.
2. AWS Landing Zone
AWS Landing Zone is a foundational building block that you need in place before performing any cloud migrations because it ensures your environment is secure. AWS’s solution automatically provides a baseline environment with a “multi-account architecture, identity and access management, governance, data security, network design and logging” to save you time and effort.
With AWS Landing Zone, there’s the ability to group AWS accounts and nonuser accounts into a logical grouping called an organizational unit, which can be configured to inherit security from a parent organizational unit. Translation: a highly protected environment, preconfigured for baseline security elements, like automatic enforcement of storing cloud trail logs. A must-have.
Figure 1: AWS Landing Zone environment at a high level
3. Powerful Partnership
Two is always better than one. The secret ingredient to a successful cloud migration is a trusted partner to support you through your journey. Luckily, AWS has a network of prevetted partners you can choose from, ranging from systems integrators, software vendors, consulting companies and managed service providers who specialize in delivering solutions, agility and optimization of AWS services. Those at the Advanced and Premier tier have invested heavily in AWS training and certifications, have a mature AWS practice and hold AWS competencies.
Advanced Consulting Partners, like TEKsystems, can help you as you’re looking to migrate, build and manage workloads on the AWS platform, as well as provide expertise in big data, DevOps and IoT across a range of industries. Consulting partners can accelerate your migration and deliver enterprise optimization of infrastructure. They can also help you customize your AWS Landing Zone to your business to maximize the value of the AWS platform. Having a powerful partnership can play a key role in enabling and supporting you across the full customer life cycle to successfully execute and achieve your business objectives.
Ultimately, cloud migration success is largely due to the strength of your foundation. With these three elements in place, you’ll be sure to achieve all the business benefits that AWS cloud services offers and run an efficient cloud transformation.
Chiragh Qureshi is an innovative leader and strategist with over 20 years of experience providing enterprise technology solutions. He has extensive experience crafting highly scalable, flexible and resilient cloud architectures that address customer business needs. Chiragh possesses numerous certifications and formal trainings in Cloud/DevOps, software engineering, information technology, project management and business administration. He is also part of an exclusive club of individuals that possesses all five AWS certifications.
Jason Radolec is an AWS and Azure cloud solutions architect for TEKsystems. From cloud security to data center and everything in between—plus six certifications—he’s an expert in the information technology and services industry. He helps build cloud consulting practices, shapes go-to market strategies and develops internal cloud delivery accelerators.