Business drivers and technical guiding principles

Business drivers

Whether your organization has already decided to move to the cloud or is close to that decision, defining and documenting business drivers for cloud migration will clarify the reasons for migrating. After the reasons are documented, you can define what will be migrated and how it will be migrated. This activity is important. We recommend that it takes place as early in the process as possible to inform and guide next steps.

Identify the stakeholders that should be part of the discussion to document the drivers. Typically, CxOs, senior managers, and key technology leaders within the organization, and your own customers. Although your customers are not likely to be part of this discussion, we recommend that one or more persons in your organization are designated represent your customers' views and goals.

Business drivers should be linked to a metric that can be measured throughout the migration journey to validate whether the outcomes have been achieved. The company's strategic goals and annual reports can act as a starting point.

Focus the conversation on where the company wants to be, based on existing and projected metrics, as a result of moving to the cloud. Consider goals and business outcomes. Also, consider what success looks like as cloud adoption increases.

Next, establish the importance level for each driver. What are the priorities? What are the expected benefits? How do the benefits support the business goals and outcomes? In the context of application portfolio assessment, the answers will help to prioritize workloads for migration and to establish technical guiding principles. However, business drivers will define and impact the migration program as a whole.

Technical guiding principles

Technical guiding principles inform migration strategy selection in later stages of portfolio assessment. In the current stage, the focus is to identify them.

Guiding principles can be established as general technology-related and approach-related decisions derived from business goals and outcomes.

For example, a company has a primary goal to reduce cost, and the desired outcome is to close an on-premises data center by a given date in 6-12 months. A resulting guiding principle is to lift and shift all applications to the cloud by using a rehost or relocate migration strategy whenever possible. In this case, the lift-and-shift approach accelerates near-term migration outcomes. After the applications have moved out of the on-premises data center, the company can focus on the main business drivers to optimize or modernize the migrated workloads.

To establish the technical guiding principles, start by analyzing business drivers. Identify a list of technologies and techniques that will achieve the business goals and outcomes. Next, refine the list and assign an order of relevance based on suitability or preference to achieve a desired outcome.

Document and communicate the guiding principles with the people involved in planning and performing the migration. Highlight concerns and potential conflicts between the principles and the actual implementation.

The following table provides an example of business drivers and technical guiding principles.

Business driver	Outcome	Metrics	Technical guiding principle
Accelerate innovation.	Improved competitiveness, increased business agility	Number of deployments per day or month, new features released per quarter, customer satisfaction scores, number of experiments	Refactor differentiating applications by using microservices and the DevOps operating model to increase agility and speed to market of new features.
Reduce operational and infrastructure costs.	Supply and demand matched, elastic cost base (pay for what you use)	Variation of spend over time	1. Rehost applications with infrastructure right-sizing. 2. Retire applications that have low or no utilization.
Increase operational resiliency.	Improved uptime, reduced mean time to recovery	SLAs, number of incidents	1. Replatform applications to the latest and best-supported operating system versions. 2. Implement high availability architectures for critical applications.
Exit the data center.	Data-center closure by a date within 6-12 months	Speed of server migrations	Rehost applications by using Cloud Migration Factory Solution.
Stay on premises, but increase agility and resiliency.	Improved competitiveness and uptime while remaining on premises	Number of deployments per day or month, new features release per quarter, SLAs, number of incidents	1. Modernize systems by extending their functionality into the cloud. 2. Assess for rehosting or replatforming to AWS Outposts.