Chapter 2. What Are the Risks and Their Mitigation?
A ship in harbour is safe, but that is not what ships are built for.
John A. Shedd, Salt from My Attic
Risk is unavoidable; your job as management is to mitigate those risks as much as possible and accept the rest. I have seen many people try to remove all risk from their migration, and this is impossible. You can spend hours and hours analyzing the situation, trying to account for every permutation of risk, start your migration, and get hit with an outage you had never even thought of. Just like in my story from Chapter 1 about the concrete crashing through the data center wall, you cannot account for everything.
What you do not want to run into with your migration is analysis paralysis. One of the unfortunate truths of any migration is that you are running portions of your infrastructure in two places at the same time. Double infrastructure means doubling some amount of cost. There are no magic migration fairies that come down and sprinkle migration dust and poof, you are in the cloud. Analysis paralysis elongates this period and puts your migration and company budget at risk. You want to address and mitigate the most significant risks to your migration. Then remind yourself that there will be some bumps along the road that you need to address on the fly.
This chapter aims to help you understand the significant risks to be mitigated. Many of these items require retooling in your thought process, such as the benefits in
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