Step 1 – assess

The assessment phase is critical for defining your starting point, which, in turn, dictates everything from your first-mover application to the migration path.

To better organize our efforts, the assessment phase can be divided into the following steps:

1. Creating an inventory/portfolio of your applications and grouping them based on similar properties
2. Bringing your development teams up to speed
3. Choosing your first-mover application

Cataloging existing applications

Creating an inventory of your existing applications/workloads and then cataloging them into similar groups is an important step, even if you already have a rough idea of which application you'll be migrating first. This is because your IT infrastructure is likely interconnected and dependent on different applications and workloads to fully function – choosing an application without fully understanding its impact on the rest of the infrastructure is not a smart...