Federal agencies are looking to cloud services to fully utilize and leverage emerging technologies that are transforming how the world operates.
Understanding the need to migrate to the cloud is the first place to start for an agency and its leaders. The hard part is figuring out how to develop a cloud migration strategy. The encouraging news is that this challenge can be transformed into a more manageable endeavor by leveraging the expertise of a reliable partner.
The first crucial step towards a successful cloud migration involves laying a solid foundation, as it sets the course for your migration strategy. This entails determining the timeline and budget for your agency's migration, which should be guided by a clear understanding of the reasons driving the cloud migration initiative.
This is also the first step where an agency working with a trusted partner comes into play, particularly around conducting a migration readiness assessment. The assessment is part of AWS’ cloud adoption framework and is utilized by Maximus as an AWS partner when working with agencies to develop migration strategies. Through this assessment, Maximus works with the agency to prepare and develop its first draft of a migration strategy, which focuses on identifying gaps that may cause issues.
Understanding costs is crucial when planning for a cloud migration, which is why Maximus leverages the AWS Total Cost of Ownership tool. This online calculator analyzes your current state and your desired future state after the migration and provides a cost estimate of the proposed architecture. Maximus uses these AWS tools in concert with others to help agencies map out potential migration scenarios and determine the right approach from them.
Once you have a strategy in place with direction, the next step is identifying the right migration tools and services for your agency. A key component of this process is outlining a reference architecture as the “to-be-built” state of your enterprise after the migration, and where and how to move databases and servers while understanding how services needed to be deployed.
As an agency is migrating to the cloud, we encourage them to use AWS Migration Hub to track the progress of workload migrations in one place.
One key aspect during this phase of the migration is storage and databases. There are a wide variety of options for agencies when it comes to migrating data into the cloud, such as AWS DataSync and AWS Database Migration Service (AWS DMS). It’s important to work with a systems integration partner, like Maximus, who has experience with these tools. We have conducted enough migrations to understand where the pitfalls are, and how to avoid the common problems that have slowed other migration projects.
After identifying a budget and timeline, along with the tools and solutions needed for a migration, it’s time to understand the value created by a cloud migration – and how you can measure it.
To learn more about how together, Maximus and AWS are helping our customers accelerate their cloud migration journey, visit: https://maximus.com/cloud-migration-partner and chat with us: Maximus Solutions | AWS (smartsheet.com).