Delivering a migration program

AWS recommends performing the migration process in three phases: Assess, Mobilize, and Migrate and Modernize. To learn about these phases and about tools and services that are available to you as you go through your migration, see How to migrate . For more detailed guidance and to learn about migration strategies, guides, and patterns, see AWS Prescriptive Guidance.

Migration planning

Long-running cloud migration programs require the coordination of several workstreams such as program governance, landing zone (an operative target environment with security controls), migration, and application portfolio. An application portfolio assessment (and subsequent migration planning) represents a foundational initial activity for any migration program. To learn about this process, see Application portfolio assessment guide for AWS Cloud migration.

Explore the 3 phases of migration defined in the AWS migration process:

1. Assess: At the start of your migration journey, you assess your organization’s current readiness for operating in the cloud. Most importantly, you identify the desired business outcomes and develop the business case for migration. To help you with this goal, AWS provides AWS Transform assessments, an Agentic AI migration assessment to simplify and optimize your cloud migration. Discover cost optimization and performance opportunities while getting detailed financial modeling to help you confidently plan your migration and maximize potential savings.

2. Mobilize: As part of the mobilize phase, you create a migration plan and refine your business case. You address gaps that were identified in the assess phase to better prepare your organization with a focus on building your baseline environment (the “landing zone”), driving operational readiness, and developing cloud skills. Watch the following video about the Mobilize phase: Learn how to mobilize for accelerated cloud migration - AWS Virtual Workshop .

3. Migrate & Modernize: The goal of the migrate-and-modernize phase is to design, migrate, and validate each application. To learn more, watch the following video from 2024: MAP Overview | Amazon Web Services.

AWS Transform

AWS Transform for migrations accelerates enterprise cloud migrations with purpose-built AI agents that automate the entire lifecycle—from discovery and wave planning through network conversion and cutover. By unifying teams, tools, and workflows in a single collaborative workbench, migrations that once took years now complete in months. It offers purpose-built transformations for mainframe, VMware, and Windows workloads, and automates code modernization at scale, from version and framework upgrades to fully custom, organization-specific transformations. By automating complex tasks like assessments, code analysis, refactoring, dependency mapping, and transformation planning, AWS Transform dramatically reduces project timelines and costs.

Staffing the migration

Migration programs can be delivered through in-house staff, external resources, or a combination of both. AWS cloud expertise is essential to ensure a successful migration, so it is critical to invest in this early on.

To get started, see Education and Enablement.

Cloud Center of Excellence (CCoE)

Your CCoE is the starting point for preparing your organization for your migration, it’s as relevant to an organization working alone or with a partner. You can choose to accelerate the creation and maturity of your CCoE with the help of a partner or through AWS Professional Services.

To learn about the importance of establishing a CCoE, watch the following video from 2024 AWS Tech Talks - Build a cloud center of excellence | AWS Events.

To learn about the role of the CCoE in your organizational readiness, see the Organizational readiness topic in this launch guide.

AWS partners

The AWS Competency Partner Program is designed to identify, validate, and promote AWS Partners with demonstrated AWS technical expertise and proven customer success. The AWS Competency Partner Program contains an extensive list of partners and offerings with a proven track record of delivery in specific industries, use cases, and workloads. The following are some competencies that can be relevant to your migration:

• AWS Managed Service Provider Partners

• AWS Migration Competency Partners

• AWS Microsoft Workloads Competency Partners

• AWS SAP Competency Partners

• AWS Oracle Competency Partner

• AWS Mainframe Modernization Competency Partner

AWS Professional Services

AWS Professional Services are a global team of AWS experts that can help you realize your desired business outcomes in the AWS Cloud. To learn more, see AWS Professional Services .

AWS Countdown Premium

AWS Countdown Premium provides proactive technical guidance during migration environment discovery and scope definition. This guidance prepares customers for planning, testing, cutover and hyper-care. You can also leverage expert AWS knowledge with technical workshops that cover platform and migration capabilities that can upskill customers and institutionalize knowledge. You can accelerate troubleshooting during the Migration Execution Plan and receive expedited troubleshooting and resolution of technical issues with service team engagement.

AWS Countdown Premium can help you migrate with confidence with the help of a designated engineer who can provide context awareness and help you resolve issues, even when it requires additional help from service teams.

AWS Managed Services

AWS Managed Services (AMS) helps you adopt AWS at scale and operate more efficiently and securely. AMS leverages standard AWS services and offers guidance and execution of operational best practices with specialized automations, skills, and experience that are contextual to your environment and applications. To help you focus on innovation, AMS provides proactive, preventative, and detective capabilities that raise the operational bar and help reduce risk without constraining agility. AMS extends your team with operational capabilities including monitoring, incident management, AWS Incident Detection and Response , security, patch, backup, and cost optimization.

Migration tooling

Our comprehensive portfolio of agentic migration services, migration competency partners, and our mature third-party migration tooling ecosystem provide automation and intelligent recommendations based on AWS machine learning to simplify and accelerate each step of the three-phase migration process.

The following video from re:Invent 2025 describes how to complete a large-scale migration and modernization with the help of agentic AI: Reimagining large-scale migration planning with agentic AI

See Education and Enablement for a recommended free course on Skill Builder that covers the migration process and tooling.

AWS Application Migration Service (Application Migration Service) provides a solution to migrate business applications from on-premise or other cloud providers easily to AWS.

To learn about the architecture of AWS Application Migration Service, watch the following video: Application Migration Service

AWS Database Migration Service (AWS DMS) is a managed migration and replication service that helps move your database and analytics workloads to AWS quickly, securely, and with minimal downtime and zero data loss. AWS DMS supports migration between more than 20 database and analytics engines.

The following video from AWS re:Invent 2023 describes AWS DMS: Mastering AWS Database Migration Service: Deep Dive into Migration Options, Serverless Capabilities, and Performance Optimization

Case studies

AWS has helped thousands of organizations, including enterprises such as GE, the Coca-Cola Company, BP, Enel, Samsung, NewsCorp, and Twenty-First Century Fox, migrate to the cloud and free-up resources by lowering IT costs while improving productivity, operational resiliency, and business agility.

To explore migration case studies across different industries, workload types, and geographies see the Migration and Modernization customer stories at the bottom of the page.

Whitepapers and AWS prescriptive guidance

AWS regularly publishes whitepapers that describe various business cases for migrating to AWS together with AWS best practices. To find these whitepapers, see the whitepaper homepage.

AWS Prescriptive Guidance provides time-tested strategies, guides, and patterns to help accelerate your cloud migration, modernization, and optimization projects. These resources were developed by AWS technology experts and the global community of AWS Partners, based on their years of experience helping customers realize their business objectives on AWS. It contains hundreds of specific migration scenarios. For example, see Migrate an on-premises Oracle database to Amazon RDS for Oracle and Export Amazon RDS for SQL Server tables to an S3 bucket by using AWS DMS.

AWS Well-Architected Labs

The AWS Well-Architected Framework describes key concepts, design principles, and architectural best practices for designing and running workloads in the cloud.

These labs help you build and assess AWS infrastructure following AWS architectural and operational best practices.

Watch a video about the pillars of the AWS Well-Architected Framework.

You can also refer to Migration Lens - AWS Well-Architected Framework.