How to migrate

The migration process

The three-phase migration process is designed to help your organization approach a migration of tens, hundreds, or thousands of applications. While each phase is a common component of a successful migration, they are not discrete phases, but an iterative process. As you iterate and migrate more applications, you will be able to drive repeatability and predictability in processes and procedures, and find that the migration process accelerates. Our comprehensive portfolio of AWS migration services, migration competency partners, and our mature third-party migration tooling ecosystem provides automation and intelligent recommendations based on AWS machine learning to simplify and accelerate each step of the three-phase migration process.

Assess
Mobilize
Migrate and Modernize

Assess
Assess

At the start of your journey, you assess your organization’s current readiness for operating in the cloud. Most importantly, you want to identify the desired business outcomes and develop the business case for migration.

Our tools help you assess your on-premises resources and build a right-sized and optimized cost projection for running applications in AWS.

Services and programs

Optimization and Licensing Assessment

When you are evaluating options for migrating to the cloud or reducing licensing costs, you can take advantage of an AWS Optimization and Licensing Assessment (AWS OLA) to save on third-party licensing costs and run your resources more efficiently. AWS OLA is a free program for new and existing customers to assess and optimize current on-premises and cloud environments, based on actual resource utilization, third-party licensing, and application dependencies.

Migration Evaluator

Migration Evaluator delivers accurate data-driven recommendations to right-size and right-cost compute. Our predictive analytics provide insights on an ongoing basis to ensure that you are always running each application in the best place, with the right software and at the lowest TCO—even as your environment, cloud options, and prices change. Migration Evaluator helps you build a clear business case to accelerate your migration planning.

AWS Migration Acceleration Program

The AWS Migration Acceleration Program (MAP) is a comprehensive and proven cloud migration program based upon AWS’s experience migrating thousands of enterprise customers to the cloud. MAP provides tools that reduce costs and automate and accelerate execution, tailored training approaches and content, expertise from Partners in the AWS Partner Network, a global partner community, and AWS investment. Specialized workload support is available for Mainframe, Windows, storage, VMware, SAP, databases, and Amazon Connect.
Mobilize
Mobilize

As part of the mobilize phase, you create a migration plan and refine your business case. You address gaps in your organization’s readiness that were uncovered in the assess phase, with a focus on building your baseline environment (the “landing zone”), driving operational readiness, and developing cloud skills.

A strong migration plan starts with a deeper understanding of the interdependencies between applications, and evaluates migration strategies to meet your business case objectives. One critical aspect of developing your migration strategy is to collect application portfolio data and rationalize applications using the seven common migration strategies: relocate, rehost, replatform, refactor, repurchase, retire, or retain.

Not every decision in a migration can be automated, but our tools help you make easier and better decisions.

Services

AWS Application Discovery Service

AWS Application Discovery Service helps you plan migration projects by gathering information about your on-premises data centers. AWS Application Discovery Service collects and presents configuration, usage, and behavior data from your servers to help you better understand your workloads.

AWS Migration Hub

AWS Migration Hub automates the planning and tracking of application migrations across multiple AWS and partner tools, allowing you to choose the migration tools that best fit
your needs.

Migration partner solutions

Enterprises migrating to AWS require expertise, tools, and alignment of business and IT strategy. Many organizations can accelerate their migration and time to results through partnership. The AWS Partner Competency Program has validated that the partners below have demonstrated that they can help enterprise customers migrate applications and legacy infrastructure to AWS.

AWS Landing Zone

AWS Landing Zone solution helps you set up a secure, multi-account AWS environment based on AWS best practices. Before you start to migrate first few applications, Landing Zone solution helps set-up your initial security baseline for your core accounts and resources.

AWS Control Tower

AWS Control Tower helps setup an automated landing zone, which is a well-architected, multi-account AWS environment. You can use Control Tower to manage your AWS environment during and after the migration. During the application migration process, Control Tower dashboards provide continuous visibility into your AWS environment.
Migrate and Modernize
Migrate and modernize

During the migrate and modernize phase, each application is designed, migrated, and validated. Leverage the services below through our migration specialists, with one of our migration competency partners, or on your own to start the process of moving applications and data to AWS.

Services for migrating and modernizing

AWS Migration Hub

AWS Migration Hub is the one destination for cloud migration and modernization, giving you the tools you need to accelerate and simplify your journey with AWS. Perhaps you’re making the case for cloud within your organization, or creating a data-driven inventory of existing IT assets. Maybe you’re planning, running, and tracking a portfolio of applications migrating to AWS. Or you might be modernizing applications already running on AWS. In all of these cases, Migration Hub can help with your cloud transformation journey.

AWS Application Migration Service

AWS Application Migration Service (AWS MGN) simplifies and expedites migration from physical, virtual, and cloud infrastructure. AWS MGN keeps your source servers up to date on AWS using continuous, block-level data replication. During replication, your applications continue to run in your source environment without downtime or performance impact. You can use the same automated process to migrate a wide range of applications and databases, including SAP, Oracle, and Microsoft SQL Server. After a minimal cutover window, your migrated servers run natively on AWS.

AWS Database Migration Service

AWS Database Migration Service (DMS) can migrate your data to and from most widely used commercial and open-source databases. AWS DMS supports homogeneous migrations such as Oracle to Oracle, as well as heterogeneous migrations between different database platforms, such as Oracle or Microsoft SQL Server to Amazon Aurora. You can use AWS DMS to continuously replicate your data with high availability and consolidate databases into a petabyte-scale data warehouse by streaming data to Amazon Redshift and Amazon S3. Learn more about AWS data transfer services.

VMware Cloud on AWS

VMware Cloud on AWS (VMC) allows you to quickly relocate hundreds of applications virtualized on vSphere to the AWS Cloud in just days and to maintain consistent operations with your VMware Cloud Foundation-based environments. VMware Cloud on AWS enables seamless bi-directional application migration with consistent policies by using vSphere vMotion between your on-premises data center and the AWS Cloud without converting or re-architecting any workload.

AWS Marketplace

AWS Marketplace is a curated digital catalog that helps you reduce costs by not over-purchasing with an in-perpetuity license. You can find, buy, deploy, and manage third-party software and services to build solutions for your business.

AWS Managed Services

AWS Managed Services (AMS) operates AWS on your behalf, providing a production-ready enterprise operating model, on-going cost optimization, and day-to-day infrastructure management. AMS takes responsibility for operating your cloud environment post migration, such as analyzing alerts and responding to incidents, enabling your internal resources to focus on the more strategic areas of your business. AWS Managed Services automates common activities, such as change requests, monitoring, patch management, security, and backup services, and provides full-lifecycle services to provision, run, and support your infrastructure.