Have you, like millions of other organizations and businesses, decided to move to the cloud to reduce IT costs, enhance business operations, increase performance, and improve security? Excellent. You can migrate almost anything to AWS, from applications to entire data centers. Interested in what precedes a properly executed data migration and how the process unfolds?

First Step – Defining the Strategy

Transitioning to the cloud affects the entire company, and a smooth transition depends on cooperation between you and the consulting partner.

Defining a cloud strategy involves determining the benefits the cloud solution will bring to the company, setting priorities, and planning a longer-term cloud strategy. A key part of the strategy is also an analysis of the return on investment for the transition to the cloud.

Second Step – Analyzing Infrastructure and Security

Our team of IT specialists will analyze the equipment you have. They will also examine the applications in use, which systems they run on, and their versions. They will determine if there is a corresponding application directly on Amazon, potentially eliminating the need for a one-to-one migration. This could save you a significant amount in licensing fees.

A substantial part of the analysis also includes monitoring how data archiving is handled, as it often does not receive sufficient attention and time.

Lastly, our team will check network security, as AWS's highest priority is data protection. They will also set up account structures and unified access (SSO).

Third Step – Time to Migrate to the Cloud

We will introduce you to suitable solutions using the AWS cloud platform. Here, the size of the storage, the computational capacity of the servers, and the number of selected services play a role.

And then we can migrate. Transitioning to some Amazon services (such as data storage) brings significant advantages. For example, switching to FSx eliminates the need to manage operating system updates, security, and only focuses on the data-sharing service you operate, thus also saving on routine system maintenance labor.

Fourth Step – Now Just Optimize Processes and Outputs

In the last but not least important step, it is necessary to monitor, evaluate, and optimize processes and outputs. This includes reserving chosen instances/virtual servers.

Reserving instances means choosing the most suitable type of instance (a combination of resources for your applications) and thus saving a lot of money on EC2 costs (Elastic Compute = a service for hosting virtual servers that can run applications = instances).

Instances differ in combinations of CPU, memory, storage, and network capacities for long-term use. This variability ensures that you can choose the right type of instance for any application. A huge advantage is the ability to adjust configurations ad hoc to your liking, even for already created instances.

Part of this step is also establishing unified access to management tools and overviews, a monthly report informing whether services are at the agreed level, project implementation realization, and also about security threats and anomalies.

Monitoring security, modern IT management tools, transparent use of services and applications – these are the advantages of cloud optimization.

It's "just four" steps, but their execution requires a lot of knowledge, experience, and time. Our team of certified experts will help you gain an overview of the current IT state, explain the advantages of transitioning to the cloud, assist with long-term cloud strategy and data migration itself. You will save a lot of time and avoid mistakes.