Migrating to AWS: A Manager's Guide

Chapter 5. Addressing Your Operational Readiness for AWS

We have covered much ground in your migration journey so far. At this point in the process, you have just received approval for your migration, based on your business case. Many people at this phase of the process think it is time to move resources. I would not recommend that approach. There is still a hefty amount of planning you need to do if you want your migration to go forward without significant disruptions. One of the critical areas that needs planning is your operations once you move into AWS. In this chapter, we will cover how to address your operational readiness to ensure that you reduce your risk of operating in the cloud.

Many consulting firms and even AWS have a phase in migration around assessing your operational readiness. I see nothing fundamentally wrong with this approach. Still, it has been my experience that many companies find little value in evaluating their readiness. Let me explain. Most companies looking to migrate into the cloud do not have any applications there currently. Maybe they have some, but they are limited to disaster recovery or development. They have yet to use the cloud in a meaningful way. They know they are not ready to operate production workloads. Therefore, there is no reason to assess their readiness. Performing analysis for a company at this stage usually ends up with a spreadsheet filled with red boxes denoting inefficiencies that they need to resolve. Ultimately, you end up ...