Cloud Migration services from your on-premise environment can sometimes be very simple and other times an extremely complicated project to implement. For either scenario, there are always considerations to bear in mind when doing so. This course has been designed to highlight these topics to help you ask the right questions to aid in a successful Cloud migration.
Within this course, we look at how timing plays an important part in your project's success and why phased deployments are important. Security is also examined where we focus on a number of key questions that you should have answers to from a business perspective before your Cloud migration. One of the biggest decisions is your chosen public cloud vendor, how do you make the decision between the available vendors, what should you look for when selecting you will host your architecture, this course dives into this question to help you finalize your choice.
Understanding the correct deployment model is essential, it affects how you architect your environment and each provides different benefits, so gaining the knowledge. I look at how you can break this question down to help you with your design considerations. We also cover service readiness from your on-premise environment and how to align these to the relevant Cloud services. Your design will certainly be different from your on-premise solution, I discuss the best approach when you start to think about your solution design, some of the dos and some of the don’ts.
Once you have your design, it’s important to understand how you are actually going to migrate your services ensuring optimum availability and minimal interruption to your customer base, for example looking at Blue/Green and Canary deployments. Cloud migration allows for some great advantages within your business continuity plans, as a result, I have included a lecture to discuss various models that work great within the Cloud.
Course Objectives
By completing this course you will:
- Have greater visibility of some of the key points of a cloud migration
- Be able to confidently assess the requirements for your migration
Intended Audience
This course has been designed for anyone who works or operates in business management, business strategy, technical management, and technical operations.
Prerequisites
For this course, it's assumed that you have a working knowledge of cloud computing and cloud principles.
What You Will Learn about Cloud Migration
Introduction - This provides an introduction to the trainer and covers the intended audience. We will also look at what lectures are included in the course, and what you will gain as a student from attending the course.
Time Management – How time plays an important part in successful cloud migration. We discuss the key points to allow time for and how to use it to plan a phased migration.
Security – This lecture will give you the ability to ask the key security questions to the business before performing a migration to the Cloud.
Selecting a Vendor – Here you will learn how to define the best way to assess which vendor would be a good fit for your migration based on a number of considerations.
Selecting a Cloud Deployment Model – This discusses different Cloud deployment models where you will understand the differences between them before gaining insight to the questions you should be asking before making a decision as to which to select.
Are your services ready to move to the Cloud? – This lecture will help provide you with the ability to identify if your on-premise applications and services are ready to migrate to the Cloud. There are a number of issues that could arise which we dive into.
Alignment of Services – Here we learn how to categorize your current services and how to map them across to the Cloud service.
New Design – This lecture discusses the importance of not performing a ‘lift and shift’ from on-premise into the Cloud. We look at how this design should be addressed using high availability and other Cloud characteristics.
Migration and Deployment options – Here you will learn the differences between the different deployment methods that could be used and how to tackle the questions around migrating your data into the Cloud to start with.
Optimization and Cost Management – Here we look at some of the considerations around optimization of your costs and how you can achieve greater efficiency.
Business Continuity – The Cloud offers a number of different DR methods which are discussed here and you will be able to define the differences between these and when to you one method over the other.
Proof of Concept – In this lecture, you will learn the importance of implementing a proof of concept design before your production migration.
Summary - Lastly, we will take note of some of the important factors learned from the previous lectures.
If you have thoughts or suggestions for this course, please contact Cloud Academy at support@cloudacademy.com.
Hello and welcome to this lecture. It's important for your business to have a realistic time frame for your Cloud migration. This will have most likely have been set up within your project plan by your program or project manager, however, check to ensure it allows for testing, phased implementations, and different deployment methods which we shall cover in depth in an upcoming lecture.
Having a defined time frame helps to ensure you receive the right level of commitment from the appropriate teams involved at the different phases and stages of your implementation. Timing also helps to define from a project management perspective how successful the project was, which is useful to see new management and other business sponsors.
Within your strategy plan, be sure to have your key milestones identified, for example, this might be as simple as having an AWS VPC configured and connected to your on-premise network, or your first-compute or storage resource deployed and operational. They help to maintain focus, measure success, and allow for a methodical phased approach to your migration, especially if this is the very first migration you would be conducting. Communicating these milestones to the rest of the business help to maintain engagement and buy-in from the rest of the organization.
Adopting a phased approach to your full migration plan will help with your timing management and organization. Set aside enough time between each phase to assess any issues you experienced to learn from and to identify any changes that may affect upcoming phases. Communicating any lessons learned throughout your deployment to other teams can help mitigate known problems and issues that may come up again. I suggest you allow time to conduct full testing at the end of each phase, testing your configurations and architecture at the end of each phase allows you to identify problems and issues quicker and helps to pinpoint where the issues may lay.
Ensure you have allocated time to make sure you have configured the correct level of security for your architecture. This is still one of the areas that many organizations fail to do to an adequate level and often leave themselves exposed to unnecessary threats. I recommend you liaise with your security and compliance officers to determine what governance and legislative controls you need to adhere to, as this can help you formulate and implement the correct level of security for your data.
Failures will happen within your migration, and it's not possible to identify what these will be and where they are. If you could, then you could mitigate them. As a result, be sure you have time allocated to resolve these problems when they occur. Failure to accurately estimate timings or allow for adequate testing and configuration of your implementation can lead to stress put on your implementation teams, which will ultimately lead to an increased risk of additional mistakes being made and unwelcome shortcuts being applied. Again, I feel the need to iterate this, taking shortcuts to your implementation, especially from a security perspective, can be devastating to a successful implementation for you and your customers.
That brings us to the end of this lecture. Coming up next, we look at different considerations when it comes to the topic of security.
Stuart has been working within the IT industry for two decades covering a huge range of topic areas and technologies, from data center and network infrastructure design, to cloud architecture and implementation.
To date, Stuart has created 150+ courses relating to Cloud reaching over 180,000 students, mostly within the AWS category and with a heavy focus on security and compliance.
Stuart is a member of the AWS Community Builders Program for his contributions towards AWS.
He is AWS certified and accredited in addition to being a published author covering topics across the AWS landscape.
In January 2016 Stuart was awarded ‘Expert of the Year Award 2015’ from Experts Exchange for his knowledge share within cloud services to the community.
Stuart enjoys writing about cloud technologies and you will find many of his articles within our blog pages.