How to Plan for a Data Center Migration

By migrating from a traditional data center environment to a cloud environment, teams will be able to more easily optimize their workloads using the tools that cloud platforms provide.

While there are potential challenges associated with data center migration, the benefits of moving from physical infrastructures, enterprise data centers, or on-premises data storage systems to a cloud data center or a hybrid cloud system are well worth the effort. To help, we've laid out a repeatable high-level migration strategy that is broken down into four phases: Discovery, Planning, Execution, and Optimization.

Phase 1: Discovery

During the Discovery phase, companies should understand and document the entire data center footprint. This means understanding the existing hardware mapping, software applications, storage layers (databases, file shares), operating systems, networking configurations, security requirements, models of operation (release cadence, how to deploy, escalation management, system maintenance, patching, virtualization, etc.), licensing and compliance requirements, as well as other relevant assets.

The objective of this phase is to have a detailed view of all relevant assets and resources of the current data center footprint.

The key milestones in the Discovery phase are:

• Creating a shared data center inventory footprint
• Every team and individual who is a part of the data center migration to the cloud should be aware of the assets and resources that will go live.
• Sketching out an initial cloud platform foundations design

This involves identifying centralized concepts of the cloud platform organization such as folder structure, Identity and Access Management (IAM) model, network administration model, and more.

As a best practice, companies should engage in cross-functional dialogue within their organizations, including teams from IT to Finance to Program Management, ensuring everyone is aligned on changes to support future cloud processes. Furthermore, once a business has migrated from a physical data center to the cloud, they should consider whether their data center team is trained to support the systems and infrastructure of the cloud provider.

Wait, there’s more. You can read the full Network Computing article here.