Migrating to the Cloud: Approach overview

Some people recently asked me what’s my approach when migrating to the Cloud, so I’ve written this post to share some ideas on the subject. Because I’ve always preferred pictures to words, I’ve put together the diagram below which hopefully will be a good starting point to the debate. Note that I use the word debate, and the reason for that is I believe there’s no “one size fits all” migration strategy. You can lay out a set of principles that can be used as the baseline, but every migration will require a different approach, as much as every environment you’ll find will always be different from the next one.

Also, I believe methodologies are continuously maturing. After every engagement, there will always be lessons learnt, and those should be used to repeatedly improve your approach.

Over the following weeks, I’ll be writing more posts that cover each of the following steps in greater detail, but for now, here’s a starting point. As always, your feedback is more than welcome, so if you have anything to say or ask, please leave a comment on this post or email me directly at MigrationToTheCloud@gmail.com. Thanks.

That’s it. Not the prettiest diagram you’ll ever see, but it’s a start. Now, for the rationale behind it. I’m starting with a conventional ADIM approach because I believe it’s simple, effective and generic enough to be applied to almost any IT project. Baked into this, there are several thoughts that emerged from my understanding of best practices and frameworks such as Zachman, TOGAF and ITIL. I’ve also applied some principles from other sources, such as Gartner or NIST.