Cloud migration of any workload can be a disruptive exercise. After all, mission operations can’t be suspended while your application is being moved to a cloud-based infrastructure. Multiplied across a complex enterprise with hundreds or thousands of workloads, migration must be smart and precise, with readiness assessed from the code level to the workforce itself. This is why Booz Allen SmartCloud offerings prioritize minimizing disruption to current workflows in moving any applications and operations into the cloud.
Built by Booz Allen and integrated with CAST Highlight, SmartLift™ accelerates the migration process with a comprehensive and automated analysis for cloud readiness so enterprises can prioritize, sequence, and address risks before moving complex infrastructures to a multitude of cloud-native environments. For a fully integrated migration solution, we’ve embedded our trusted, data-driven framework from Bento so organizations can access modeling, business variables, code analysis, budget estimates, and planning all in one dashboard. By choosing the right approach, migrations can be designed with minimization in mind.
This starts with choosing the right migration approach, minimizing the impact of necessary trade-offs and disruption considerations. Rehosting, redeployment, repackaging, refactoring, retiring, among others, each come with unique benefits. Sometimes, a "lift-and-shift" framework that prioritizes speed to launch by retaining core functionality before adding more complex and specialized tools and processes seems best. However, while minimizing initial disruptions, it is difficult to scale, and as needed complexity comes, so too does disruption. Refactoring or re-architecting an application at the outset to enable greater cloud-native features can improve performance and enable scale and may be worth the upfront efforts.
Regardless of the migration approach, we leverage proven, human-centric project management approaches to develop realistic, clearly communicated roadmaps, and agile methodology to plan, build, and carefully roll out incremental changes. In addition, related strategies that we employ to keep transitions as seamless as they are impactful include:
- Parallel development: For short sprints, we test new development beside current processes to ensure a full understanding for all users.
- Phased data and functionality migration: We migrate data, tools, and users in a deliberate fashion, employing change management to promote speedy, painless adoption of new processes, tools, and interfaces.
- Canary Releases and Rollback Patterns: We maintain a persistent recovery plan that will restore all legacy data, access, environmental configuration, and functions should any dimension of the migration not meet expectations.
- Focus groups: We use focus groups to test new tools and user adoption strategies to help get workforces up to speed as quickly and smoothly as possible.