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How to migrate to AWS: A Structured Approach

We see cloud journeys a little differently to everyone else. Take a look from our perspective at what makes for a successful migration and how we’ll get you there.

Why Migrate to AWS?

The journey to AWS opens up new heights for businesses. However, this journey comes with its own set of challenges, such as strategic planning, securing executive buy-in, managing costs, and ensuring operational continuity. How can we help?

Your Migration is Our Mission

Every business should be able to go on a cloud migration. As an Advanced AWS Partner, we're not just technical migration experts; we're your strategic partners committed to harnessing the transformative power of the largest cloud provider in the world for you and your business.

Expert Navigators

We specialise in navigating the complexities of AWS migration. As an AWS Migration Competency Partner, we leverage AWS's extensive suite of services and our deep expertise to turn these challenges into opportunities, ensuring your migration delivers strategic business value.
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The Cloud Bridge Advantage

Choosing Cloud Bridge means you're choosing a partner dedicated to your success:

  • Business case

    From day one, we’ll help you to build a compelling, data-driven business case that clearly demonstrates the ROI of migrating to AWS.

  • Migration acceleration program

    Our expertise in the AWS Migration Acceleration Program (MAP) helps to secure funding for you, making your migration journey cost-effective.

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  • Platform expertise

    Knowing AWS as well as we do, we offer you unparalleled platform expertise evidenced by a whole stack of successful migration track records.

  • Modernisation services

    We offer modernisation services post-migration to enhance your cloud infrastructure's performance, security, and scalability for years to come.

Securing Funding for Your Migration

You shouldn’t need to break the bank (or rob one) to access the cloud. For this reason, a cornerstone of our strategy has always been assisting our customers in securing AWS funding, removing one of the biggest barriers to cloud accessibility.

Identifying and Navigating Funding Programmes

We’ll guide you through the application process for AWS funding, ensuring you receive the financial support needed for an efficient migration, so you always feel in control of your budget and costs

Financial Planning and Cost Optimisation

Beyond initial funding, we offer dedicated financial planning and cost optimisation services. Engaging us in these areas will ensure your AWS investment continues to deliver value.

A Three-Phase Migration Process

The AWS Migration Acceleration Programme (MAP) breaks down your migration into three phases: Assess, Mobilise, and Migrate/Modernise. This framework provides you with a clear structure for your migration, at the start of which we almost always add automated discovery via the “Optimisation and Licensing Assessment” (OLA).

The OLA gives us a quick view across the servers in your existing setup. We use a variety of tools for this, but usually Cloudamize is our discovery tool of choice.
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Cloudamize supplies key info, such as the operating system, installed applications, CPU and memory sizes, and amount of storage. It also gives us actual performance stats, which it gathers over a period of a couple of weeks. That allows it to provide “right sized” estimates, giving a more accurate view of the target AWS environment.

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Assess

We begin the MAP Assess phase by zooming out to get a view of the different applications across the estate. At Cloud Bridge, we often call these “workloads”, to avoid confusion with processes that run on individual servers. Take the example of a legacy Microsoft Exchange estate; you might have several Exchange servers working together. To us, that would comprise the Exchange workload.

AWS Migration Portfolio Analysis

To identify these workloads, we use tools such as AWS Migration Portfolio Analysis to collate the servers into groups. There's definitely a human element — we like to identify owners for each app and check in with them to get a sense for feasibility — but there's a lot we can do with automated discovery. Cloudamize shows us how servers are communicating and which ports they're using. We can then visually group these in the start of an application grouping.

The 7 Rs

With the applications grouped, we can then work with the customer to identify a high-level strategy for each workload (the "7 Rs"). We refer to the lift-and-shift approach as "Rehost" but we'll often look at whether we can re-platform (for example, utilising managed database services rather than self-hosted) or re-factor (meaning that we'll modernise the workload to use more cloud-native technology, such as containerisation or serverless technologies).
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Mobilise

In the Mobilise phase, we produce high- and low-level designs for each workload, which go on to shape a project plan showing how we'll migrate every workload into AWS. This is also where we put together our "landing zone" on AWS, including figuring out the organisational structure of AWS accounts. 

We work with you to identify security and compliance requirements and put a framework in place (including guardrails) using AWS Control Tower to centralise management, monitoring and governance. By the end, we have a clear timeline, estimates of hours, and a detailed plan, which we execute to move the workloads.

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Migrate & Modernise

Executing the migration, we utilise AWS tools and programs for efficiency. This phase includes modernisation efforts to align your infrastructure with best practices and emerging technologies. Is this the beginning or the end of your cloud journey?

Migration in Motion

By this point, we've already set up a scalable, enterprise-ready AWS environment and validated our plans with some well-chosen pilots. Executing them, we’ll work in concert with the customer to migrate in predetermined waves. Our project management tooling gives a clear view of where we are in the migration and highlights any risks or delays so that they can be expedited where necessary.

Lift and Shift

If it's been a lift-and-shift migration, then that's the beginning of the journey. You’re now in AWS, and we're at the first step of continuous improvement (using our FinOps service to optimise for cost and security), as well as then looking at ways to modernise, scale and become more cloud-native. This leads to a virtuous circle; the idea is that we drive down costs, freeing up budget for more IT projects in the future.
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Start Your AWS Journey Here

If you'd like to find out more about migrating to AWS with Cloud Bridge, simply complete this form and we'll be in touch.

 

 

Watch our Video

Our MD, Simon Walker, talks about cloud migration challenges and how we solve them.

 

The Beginning or End of your Cloud Journey?

Whether people or systems, a migration isn’t just the act of moving from one place to another. It’s the thriving of those people or systems in their new location, long-term growth made possible not just by a change in location but by the settling of that area. 

We don't just migrate you to AWS; we help your business to harness the full potential of the platform for long-term success. From initial assessment to post-migration optimisation, we're your strategic partner in leveraging AWS for business growth.

 

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Cloud Centre of Excellence (CCOE)

We assist in establishing a Cloud Centre of Excellence (CCoE) to drive cloud best practices and innovation within your organisation.

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Cloud Governance & FinOps

Cloud governance and FinOps ensure ongoing compliance and cost efficiency through governance frameworks and financial management.

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Managed Services

Managed services and regular architectural reviews keep your AWS environment optimised, secure, cost efficient and aligned with your goals.

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