Identifying risks and barriers
A solid risk management plan, including identification of potential barriers, is essential to a successful transition.
- Per project, after a strategy is determined, identify workload-specific risks or barriers.
- Technical challenges might include availability concerns, data sync issues, encryption, application technical limitations, and so on.
- Nontechnical challenges might include data protection or compliance concerns (for example, GDPR), cost, timing (avoid peak loads), training, org impacts, resourcing, and so on.
- Develop risk mitigation strategies.
- For example, ensure that migrated data remains encrypted, don’t touch live workloads during sync, plan any reorganizations, providing training, and so on.
- Ensure the plan, including the risk mitigation, is documented for each transition project.
Common challenges
- Live data is not easy to migrate.
- Data in active applications is changing rapidly and thus cannot be easily migrated through backup and restore.
- Applications and infrastructure deployment is not automated.
- Automation to redeploy is not available or not suitable.
- Applications contain hardcoded references.
- Applications refer to specific IP or DNS or other addresses that make setting up a parallel deployment difficult.
- Applications refer to specific service or user identities that are account-specific make moving to a new account difficult.
- Joining multiple VPCs with transit gateways can be complicated by problems with overlapping address spaces and poor network ACLs.