Data center Migration

Are you looking for the fastest route to Azure or another public cloud? If so, you'll no doubt find Rehost – a lift-and-shift solution where your virtual machines are migrated to the cloud one by one – useful. Yet that's rarely the end of the road, as the first step towards the cloud goes hand in hand with Replatform. A number of virtual machines are migrated to cloud PaaS services – such as a database service or web app service – so you can take advantage of the benefits offered by PaaS components with minimal adjustments. In the end, if you want to get the most out of the cloud, it's best to follow this with an application modernization process.

Why switch to the cloud?

Data center migration – a well-planned approach

With a lift-and-shift data center migration to the public cloud, we've got every angle covered. To make any migration successful, it ideally needs to be aligned with your organization's cloud strategy. We can also help here. Read more about what a Cloud Transformation Journey looks like here.

We distinguish between the following different steps during the data center migration:

Step 1: Data center migration assessment

The current environment is mapped following a wide-ranging assessment. The migration approach is determined based on best practices and an in-depth analysis, with a high-level plan being drawn up. After this assessment, you'll have a good view of the complexity and feasibility of the cloud migration on the one hand, and its costs and timeframe on the other.

Step 2: Data center migration

Based on the information gathered during the assessment, we'll plan the actual migration down to the finest detail. The migration is then prepared and carried out meticulously:

1. Development of the technical design for the future environment on Azure or AWS.
2. Definition and construction of the landing zone, which provides the foundations based on identity, networking, security, scalability and governance.
3. Definition of the strategy, with a choice between a phased migration or a big bang approach:
   
   Phased migration: servers that form a single workload are migrated together, ensuring that each phase has a limited impact in terms of users. One drawback could be that this approach may not be feasible or is extremely difficult due to interdependencies between servers and applications.
   
   Big bang approach: all workloads are migrated to the cloud environment at one time. This approach is often used in smaller environments.
    
4. Implementation of the migration, preceded by a test migration.

Step 3: Data center optimization

Your cloud journey doesn't end after the migration. Quite the opposite, in fact. Once your environment has moved to the cloud, we can continuously improve it in terms of cost-effectiveness, security, performance, architecture and more, while you can further modernize your applications through an application modernization process..