Cloud migration

Most of the benefits of working with external experts fall under business common sense and you know them perfectly well. However, you can gain additional benefits thanks to our AWS Migration & Modernization Partner status:

• Participation in the AWS Migration Acceleration Program (MAP) — a comprehensive and proven cloud migration program based upon AWS’s experience migrating thousands of enterprise customers to the cloud. Its three-phased approach to cloud migration helps accelerate the process, minimize risk, and provides access to cost offsetting options to reduce the initial cost of your cloud migration.
• Competency partners within the AWS Partner Network, like Chaos Gears, are vetted and measured against a high bar to achieve AWS specialization. AWS validates our expertise in delivering services and solutions across specific industries, use cases and workloads — contingent on positive feedback from previous customers. Therefore, if you are looking to migrate to AWS, teaming up with a AWS' Cloud Migration Services Competency partner is a great starting point for a successful migration.
  
  You can always verify a partner's AWS-validated qualifications on their AWS Partner Network page, like in our case.

Migrations can be complex and sensible frameworks must be flexible enough to accommodate the unique characteristics of each organization. Even so, empirical evidence has shown that a structured approach with logical, clearly defined steps is conducive to optimal outcomes.

Each migration to AWS follows 3 distinct primary phases: Assess, Mobilize, Migrate and Modernize. Each phase involves detailed steps and defines required outcomes to keep the migration on track. However, broadly speaking, the entire cloud migration process can typically be abbreviated to these key steps:

1. Build a business case;
2. Determine the right migration strategies;
3. Evaluate costs and needs;
4. Choose deployment models;
5. Design the architecture and define scope;
6. Develop and deploy a MVP;
7. Execute the migration;
8. Test and validate workloads;
9. Cutover and go-live;
10. Post-migration monitoring, support, and optimization.

Each migration to AWS is unique, but organizations typically face similar challenges throughout the migration process. When unchecked, they can effectively prevent the promised benefits of cloud computing from materializing. Partners like Chaos Gears can help you successfully navigate such challenges.

1. Cloud migration complexity

   Fully migrating all existing systems to the cloud in one go can be daunting. Except — it does not actually need to happen in one go, nor do all systems need to be migrated. The best way forward varies from organization to organization, and it is therefore prudent to team up with a cloud migration partner who knows all intricacies of AWS' extensive cloud and can guide while you define the goals.

   Even the most complex architectures can eventually be broken up into smaller pieces if need be, and the entire process can happen in stages as granular as we need it to be for successful outcomes. In order for that to be possible, we are crucially diligent during the Assess phase of the migration to accurately identify and map out your existing environments and its interdependencies. Especially in larger organizations, we rely on specialized tools to help automate and speed up the discovery process.

2. Cultural resistance to cloud adoption

   We prioritize aligning all stakeholders as early as possible and creating a cloud center of excellence to facilitate gradually overcoming internal resistance to change with open communication, training and support for your teams.

3. Skill gaps

   Performing a cloud migration in partnership with an external team of experts like Chaos Gears effectively eradicates this challenge, while cooperation in e.g. a managed cloud service model can also let you focus on your core business in the long term.

   Regardless of the partnership model you choose, we facilitate a steady, best-in-class knowledge transfer as we cooperate on your cloud migration and we'll be happy to guide you towards the most effective upskilling programs for your internal teams, if you desire to take over all operational duties post migration.

4. Compliance and security

   While compliance and security are shared responsibilities between a cloud provider and its customers, AWS supports 140+ security standards and compliance certifications (e.g. PCI-DSS, GDPR, HIPAA) and actively helps customers meet compliance requirements where those fall under AWS' responsibility.

   We help identify security and compliance bottlenecks early on in the process and guide organizations toward efficient implementations in accordance with best practices. With more than 20 years of experience providing cybersecurity services — including formal authorization to access Top Secret information — we take pride in our security-first approach to cloud migrations.

5. Cost management

   It can be daunting to navigate AWS' extensive catalog of cloud services and solutions at first — and accurately estimating runtime costs of complex environments is even more difficult. However, a migration partner like Chaos Gears can help not just with determining the total cost of ownership during the initial stages of your cloud migration — cloud expertise goes a long way in finding nuanced but impactful cost optimization opportunities in often overlooked places.

   We emphasize open communication and knowledge transfers during all stages of the migration for countless reasons — and cost management is one of them. A culture of cost-awareness rooted in a good understanding of AWS as a whole, and its pricing model in particular, will help you curb costs more efficiently than any tool possibly could — but we will introduce you to those, too.

   Once you are in the cloud, we advise performing periodic optimization reviews of your cloud infrastructure. You can, of course, perform those on your own — but leaving cloud cost optimization to us can be more efficient.

6. Data migration and integration

   Data transfer and integrity issues can undermine the outcomes that prompted the cloud migration in the first place. Subtle inconsistencies can have severe consequences that extend well beyond the financial cost of remedies — especially because they often go unnoticed for a very long time, even in relatively simple architectures.

   Chaos Gears has a first-class data engineering team to help you guarantee data integrity both during and after the migration process, but also establish data security and governance best practices which ensure your data remains encrypted, secured and backed up — with least-privilege access restricted to the right entities, at the right time.

   Once the crucial fundamentals — reliability and security — are properly taken care of, we can help you turn towards the true potential of your data, seamlessly consolidating various sources into a central cloud data environment, unlocking advanced business intelligence and analytics tools, and, of course, cutting-edge machine learning and generative AI solutions.

Cloud migration partners perform a migration readiness assessment as part of the initial stages of the process (i.e. during the Assess step). It consists of a systematic evaluation of an organisation's resources, processes, applications, infrastructure, and cultural readiness for cloud migration in order to:

• learn how far along an organization is in their cloud journey,
• understand their current cloud-readiness strengths/weaknesses,
• build an action plan to close identified gaps.

The 6 perspectives of the AWS Cloud Adoption Framework (business, people, governance, platform, security, operations) help us gain a holistic view of the organization and what's required for a successful move to the cloud.

A well-executed assessment typically also helps build alignment and consensus within the team, identify existing best practices that can be scaled and reduce blockers to migration progress.

Once we have a good overview of the situation, we proceed with a detailed TCO analysis to establish baseline costs and cost projections that inform decisions and strategy choices made later on in the process.

Originally defined by Gartner, the 7R approach to cloud migration strategies is a living model rooted in current industry needs and best practices. In practice, any sensible cloud migration is a mix and blend of those strategies, chosen according to concrete workload and business requirements.

1. Retire

   Used when decommissioning legacy applications which have outlived their purpose and value. To simplify the migration, reducing its costs and complexity: retire such workloads as the first step towards the adoption of modern, cloud-native deployments.

2. Retain (Revisit later)

   Applicable to applications you simply want to keep in their current environment, or those deemed too difficult to migrate to the cloud at this given moment, but which still have business value and can therefore not be retired. In this case, the workload often gets deprecated and retired/replaced gradually.

3. Rehost (Lift and shift)

   When applicable, this is often the simplest migration strategy. It allows you to move an on-prem application and its dependencies to the cloud as-is, and the process can often be automated with infrastructure-as-a-service offerings (e.g. AWS Application Migration Service). Your service remains online during rehosting to minimize disruption and downtime.

   In practice, this is often the first step in a hybrid strategy geared towards long-term modernization. After all, applications are easier to optimize or re-architect once they are already in the cloud.

4. Relocate (Hypervisor-level lift and shift)

   When applicable, this is often the quickest migration strategy. It allows you to migrate your application without affecting ongoing operations, and requires no architectural modifications nor new hardware. Relocating involves transferring servers from an on-premises platform (e.g. Kubernetes, VMware), to a cloud version of the platform (e.g. Amazon Elastic Kubernetes Service). Your service remains online during relocation to minimize disruption and downtime.

5. Repurchase (Drop and shop)

   Used when decommissioning internal legacy systems in favor of third-party services (such as software-as-a-service offerings) to tie IT costs to actual revenue generation in a pay-as-you-go pricing model. Repurchasing your application or parts of it typically reduces operational complexity and costs associated with maintenance, infrastructure, and licensing.

6. Replatform (Lift, tinker and shift / lift and reshape)

   Used when you want to migrate an application to the cloud and enhance it with modern cloud offerings or optimize its performance/cost profile thanks to services available in the cloud. It typically involves keeping the application operational during the lift and tinker stage, up until the enhancements are production-ready and it can be shifted to the new version.

7. Refactor (Re-architect)

   Typically the most involved migration strategy, refactoring is primarily a long-term investment which involves at least partial re-architecting and rewriting of the application to seamlessly incorporate cloud-native capabilities. This often entails breaking down previously monolithic codebases into smaller organizational units (microservices, serverless functions etc.) that are easier to scale and manage in accordance with cloud-optimal practices.

   This strategy may be relatively costly during migration, but when executed properly can result in a substantial long-term cut in development and operating costs.