Accelerating Your Cloud Migration: A Comprehensive Guide

Migrating to the cloud can be a daunting task, but with the right approach, you can significantly accelerate your migration efforts and realize business value faster. This comprehensive guide, based on the Microsoft Cloud Adoption Framework, outlines the key steps to help you overcome common migration roadblocks and streamline your cloud migration journey.

Step 1: Align Stakeholders

Successful cloud migration starts with aligning your business and IT stakeholders. Begin by understanding and categorizing the motivations that drive your migration efforts, and then capture the desired business outcomes. Use the strategy and plan template to document this information.

Step 2: Align Partner Support

Identify the right level of partnership and support to assist you throughout the migration process. Establish terms and conditions or other contractual agreements with approved partners before engaging them.

Step 3: Gather Data and Analyze Assets and Workloads

Use a data-driven approach to understand your current IT environment. Perform a quantitative analysis on your existing inventory to refine the business justification, and then conduct a deep qualitative assessment of the first 10 workloads to be migrated.

Step 4: Make a Business Case

Evaluate the initial high-level return from a potential cloud migration, ensuring that all stakeholders align on the decision to adopt the cloud. Use the strategy and plan template to record your business justification.

Step 5: Create a Migration Plan

Develop a cloud adoption plan using the basic template, define your workloads, align assets and workloads, and establish iteration, velocity, and releases for the migrated workloads. Be aware of potential timeline risks, such as lack of familiarity with Azure DevOps and the complexity of each workload.

Step 6: Build a Skills Readiness Plan

Evaluate your existing skills and identify any additional skills required for the migration effort. Add a skills-readiness plan to the strategy and plan template.

Step 7: Deploy and Align a Landing Zone

Choose the right approach to deploying a landing zone based on your adoption pattern, and then expand it to include the necessary components for resource organization, security, governance, compliance, and operations. Be mindful of potential timeline risks related to governance, operations, and security requirements.

Step 8: Migrate Your First 10 Workloads

The technical effort required to migrate your first 10 workloads is relatively straightforward, but it’s an iterative process that you’ll repeat as you migrate more assets. Follow the steps outlined in the Azure migration guide, the migration examples, and the Azure cloud migration best practices to mature your team’s migration capabilities.

Step 9: Hand Off Production Workloads to Cloud Governance

Governance is a key factor in the long-term success of your migration effort. Deploy an initial governance foundation, and complete a Governance Benchmark assessment to identify gaps and plan for future improvements.

Step 10: Hand Off Production Workloads to Cloud Operations

Migrating individual workloads to the cloud without an understanding of ongoing enterprise operations can be risky. In parallel with migration, plan for longer-term operations by defining business commitments, establishing a management baseline, and expanding the management baseline.

By following these steps, you can significantly accelerate your cloud migration efforts, remove common blockers, and realize business value more quickly. Remember, the Cloud Adoption Framework is a lifecycle solution that helps you mature the teams that support your migration efforts. Continuously iterate on your strategies, plans, and platform to improve your organization’s overall cloud readiness.

For more information, visit the Microsoft Cloud Adoption Framework.