Windows migration process
Migrating an existing Windows environment to AWS requires careful planning and implementation. The process involves identifying your current usage of resources, assessing the cost savings potential of migrating to AWS, determining your security needs, and building a well-defined cloud architecture that meets all your organization's requirements. You can use AWS to migrate your current Windows server infrastructure quickly and easily, reducing operational costs while maximizing system efficiency. AWS also offers a range of powerful tools and services to help you maintain control over the entire process and to make sure that your Windows environment in the cloud is optimally configured for maximum performance.
This section provides an overview of the three-phase migration process that AWS developed to assist organizations in the successful migration of several applications to the AWS Cloud: assess, mobilize, and migrate and modernize.
Assess
The assess phase helps you understand the state of your organization's readiness to move to the cloud. You can use AWS tools to assist you in the assess phase by assessing your on-premises computing resources and building a cost projection for running applications on AWS. We recommend that you consider the following tools:
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Use the migration readiness assessment to understand where you are in the cloud journey.
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Use the AWS Optimization and Licensing Assessment (AWS OLA)
to assess and optimize current on-premises and cloud environments, based on actual resource utilization, third-party licensing, and application dependencies. -
Use the Migration Evaluator
to help you build a data-driven business case for migration to AWS. -
Use the Cloud Economics Center
to build a business case for your migration by defining your objectives, such as improved reliability, cost optimization, and scalability. -
Use AWS Transform to collect server and application inventory data for the assessment, planning, and tracking of your migration.
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Use the Migration Validator Toolkit PowerShell module to discover your Microsoft workloads and migrate them to AWS.
Mobilize
During the mobilize phase, you develop a migration plan and iterate on your business plan and address any gaps in your readiness that were revealed in the assess phase. It's critical to focus on building your baseline environment, driving operational readiness, and developing cloud skills. Migrating a large application portfolio can be a complex task. To ease this process, AWS provides a range of tools and services to help you migrate a set of pilot workloads to the cloud quickly, securely, and cost effectively. Gathering data on your application portfolio and rationalizing applications using one or more of the seven common migration strategies—rehost, relocate, replatform, repurchase, refactor/re-architect, retain, and retire—can provide an improved basis for decision-making. AWS offers a suite of services that you can use to migrate Windows-based applications and workloads to the cloud, including the following:
Migrate and modernize
In the migrate and modernize phase, you must carefully design, migrate, and validate each application that's in scope for migration. Application Migration Service makes it easy to migrate large numbers of servers from physical, virtual, or cloud infrastructure to AWS. With Application Migration Service, you can use the same automated process for a wide range of applications and quickly lift and shift them from an existing environment to the cloud.
The Cloud Migration
Factory on AWS
Your teams are experts in building and running Microsoft workloads on premises. That experience can be enhanced in the cloud. Migrating to AWS can provide an even more efficient and reliable experience for the Windows world you've come to rely on. With AWS, you'll get access to a broad range of cloud services that are designed to make it easier and faster to migrate your existing Microsoft workloads. You can benefit from more scalable capacity, improved storage options, and enhanced security.
