Evaluating migration readiness

Migration specialists, Amazon Web Services (AWS)

August 2019 (document history)

A migration readiness assessment is a process of gaining insights into how far along an organization is in their cloud journey, understanding their current cloud-readiness strengths and weaknesses, and building an action plan to close identified gaps. You can use the Amazon Web Services (AWS) Cloud Adoption Framework (AWS CAF) and its six perspectives (business, people, governance, platform, security, and operations) as a framework to help ensure that you have a holistic view of the transformation initiative that is required for an effective move to the cloud.

The AWS Prescriptive Guidance migration strategy uses Migration Readiness Assessment (MRA) as the prescriptive model for the assessment phase. Although other methods are available, they might compromise the completeness or depth of the review.

Three outcomes are expected from a readiness review:

• An understanding of where an organization is in its cloud journey

• Identified areas of strength and weakness from a cloud-readiness perspective

• An action plan to resolve the identified gaps, so the organization can migrate at scale without having to pause to solve foundational issues

In addition, there are often these additional outcomes:

• Alignment and consensus building within the team

• Identification of best practices within the organization that can be leveraged and scaled

• A reduction in roadblocks that can disrupt progress