Take time for discovery and assessment—and consider a partner—for a successful cloud migration

One of the most interesting facets of any migration project is why it succeeds or fails. In our experience, we’ve found that there is one factor that overwhelmingly determines migration success or failure: the process of discovery and assessment. For organizations that take the time to do a complete, thorough analysis of their existing IT landscape, they’re almost always better suited to succeed at their migration. This is because they gain a crisp, full understanding of what they’re working with on-prem (or in other clouds) and how it all ties together. From there, they can make smart choices about what they migrate, how they migrate it, and to where. 

In many cases, an organization might spend more time on their assessment and subsequent planning than they do on the actual migration! If you’ve laid the proper foundation up front, it will make your migration go that much more smoothly. For example, a big part of migration is understanding the dependencies between systems you wish to migrate. By understanding those dependencies, you can create a more precise migration plan, which includes the groups of systems you move and the order you move them in. 

The inverse is true, too: if you don’t spend enough time on discovery, assessment, and planning, then you’re likely to hit unforeseen challenges and obstacles during your migration that can result in time and cost overruns, or sometimes outright failure. Following our example above, if you try to migrate a system that has dependencies that you weren’t aware of, it’s possible to inadvertently break the functionality that those systems were providing. That’s not a situation any business wants to be in. Thankfully, those situations are entirely avoidable with the right up-front planning. 

Planning for success with discovery and assessment
Given how important discovery, assessment, and planning is to a successful cloud migration, what are the steps organizations can take to do those tasks well? From our perspective, we want to make sure these crucial phases get done right, so we’ve handpicked a few technology partners who have purpose-built solutions for these exact use cases. We work with these partners to make sure their solutions are thorough and accurate, and can deliver the intelligence our customers need for their existing landscapes.

In addition to that, we integrate our own Google Cloud Console with key capabilities from some of these discovery and assessment solutions. With RISC Networks, for example, you can port the discovery and assessment results directly into a file that Migrate to Virtual Machines, one of Google Cloud’s migration tools, will use to migrate your systems. These types of integration give you a seamless way to transition from planning to migration, helping reduce the time and labor you need to spend on your migration project, and also giving you a better chance for success through tighter integrations. For more information, check out the RISC Networks tutorial.

Ready to dive in? Head over to Migration Center to start exploring Google Cloud's centralized, end-to-end hub for migration and modernization, which includes Migrate to Virtual Machines. Not quite there yet? Check out this 3-minute video on Migration Center, or sign up for a free IT discovery and assessment with Google Cloud, so you can figure out exactly what your IT landscape looks like and how you can migrate it successfully!