Creating the IT asset visibility map

There's a famous line in Alice in Wonderland: "If you don't know where you are going, any road will get you there." You can actually turn this around: if you want to go somewhere, you need to know where you're coming from. Let's put this into practice: if we want to transform the enterprise, we need to know what it is we are transforming. That's why every approach to digital transformation starts with assessments and discovery. An enterprise needs to have full visibility of all of its assets. The following figure shows the basic steps in a migration and transformation plan, starting with the assessment:

Figure 7.3 – High-level plan for migration

When all assets have been identified, we can start the planning of migrating and transforming these assets to a new target landing zone, typically a platform in the public cloud. Applications need to be validated so that the right strategy...