7 Top Tips for a Faster and Easier AWS Migration

Migrating to AWS is a big step for any business, but it doesn’t need to be daunting. By following a few smart cloud migration strategies, you can simplify the entire process and avoid common migration pitfalls.

In this guide, we’ll walk you through seven practical tips to make AWS cloud migration faster, smoother, and less stressful. From choosing the right migration tools to avoiding costly delays, these practical insights will help you approach the process with clarity and confidence.

Let’s dive right in. 

How to Migrate to AWS Faster and With Less Hassle?

For the uninitiated, AWS migration is the process of moving your business’s data, applications, and IT operations from on-premises or other cloud platforms to Amazon Web Services (AWS). It helps you modernize infrastructure, improve scalability, and reduce costs.

Here’s a low-down on seven AWS cloud migration best practices that guarantee better performance and flexibility.

1. Define Clear Objectives & Scope

Clearly outline the goals behind AWS migration. What’s your end motive? Elevating performance, boosting agility, or saving costs? Having a clear understanding of the motivators can help facilitate cloud migration strategy, planning, and execution toward the right path. Conduct a rigorous assessment of your existing applications, data, and dependencies, identify workloads to migrate first, and chalk out an action plan that helps your AWS migration team move forward, confidently. 

Pro Tip: It’s intelligent to start with less critical applications to minimize risks and secure the success of your cloud migration right at the beginning.

2. Carry Out a Comprehensive Assessment

Next, run a deep scan through your IT establishment, understand business maturity, and evaluate each application’s dependencies, performance requirements, and security needs. Being aware of your business from the ground up can help in deciding the most appropriate migration strategy—lift-and-shift, re-platforming, or re-architecting.

Keep the “data imperative” in mind. Analyze data volumes, sensitivities, and storage to select the best option from the various AWS migration strategies. 

Pro Tip: Use AWS Migration Hub for a unified view of your migration. Partner with a cloud migration services provider to leverage its real-time tracking and recommendations, ensuring smoother progress and early issue detection.

3. Build a Strong Migration Plan

The success of an AWS migration initiative relies on the strength of its plan. Create a robust, done-to-detail migration plan that specifies timelines, resources needed, and specific tasks for each phase of the migration—preparation, planning, migration, and optimization. 

Put actionable risk management and mitigation plans into action. This is a crucial step in anticipating roadblocks and developing contingency strategies. To get started, connect with a leader in AWS migration consulting services to plan how to risk-proof your initiative. Additionally, implement testing procedures to ensure applications perform reliably in the cloud environment and establish robust backup and disaster recovery protocols.

Pro Tip: Adhere to an iterative approach. Break your AWS migration into smaller, manageable phases and conduct pilot migrations to test and refine processes before scaling up.

4. Choose an Appropriate Migration Strategy

After identifying your goals, organizational DNA, and migration plan, the next order of business is choosing a cloud migration strategy. AWS offers a multitude of migration strategies known as the “7 Rs.”

7 AWS Migration Strategies: Pick One That Actually Suits You

Navigating AWS’s migration strategies can be complex, even for the most competent minds. Here’s an overview of what each strategy offers, along with its merits and demerits. 

If you still need more clarity, the route to hiring experienced cloud transformation services is always open. Find the right cloud migration company and accelerate your adoption for fundamental scalability benefits. 

Rehost (Lift and Shift)

The Rehost approach involves moving applications as-is to the cloud using tools like Server Migration Service (SMS) or manual procedures. It’s well suited for large legacy migrations and organizations with limited cloud technology expertise.

Pros: 

• Simplifies the migration process without altering business processes
• Offers a faster time to market

Cons:

• Limited flexibility and optimization of cloud resources
• Difficult to extend or modify applications

Replatform (Lift, Tinker, and Shift)

The Replatform strategy entails moving applications with minor adjustments, such as replacing certain components with AWS services (e.g; swapping a self-hosted database for Amazon RDS). This way of migrating workloads to AWS is suitable for organizations seeking conservative migrations with some optimization.

Pros

• Faster migration
• Minimal integration and testing efforts
• Cost efficient

Cons

• Limited ability to fully utilize cloud benefits
• May need rearchitecting later for more complex requirements

Repurchase (Drop and Shop)

Replacing an existing application with a cloud-native service, such as transitioning from an on-premises ERP system to a cloud-hosted version, is the Repurchase AWS migration strategy. It’s ideal for projects ready to adopt new licensing models and entirely new systems. 

Pros

• Access to advanced features and improved scalability
• Maximizes the use of cloud capabilities

Cons

• Potentially high costs
• Requires significant organizational adaptation and process changes

Refactor / Re-architect

The Refactor/Rearchitect cloud migration strategy, as the name suggests, involves a complete makeover for seamless cloud adoption. It involves redesigning and rebuilding an application for a cloud-native environment. The Refactor/Rearchitect way of migrating to AWS is an ideal bet for projects requiring enhanced scalability, performance, or new features.

Pros

• Offers maximum flexibility, efficiency, and cost optimization benefits
• Full utilization of cloud features like auto scaling and serverless computing
• Long-term savings

Cons

• Most expensive option
• Involves extensive re-architecting and changes to business processes

Retire

This Retire approach involves identifying and decommissioning applications that are no longer necessary, rather than migrating them to the cloud. It’s suitable for applications that offer little or no business value, helping streamline operations by eliminating legacy applications. 

Pros

• Frees up resources for critical applications
• Reduces overall migration effort
• Eliminates complexity and expenses

Cons

• Improper retiring may result in losing historical or compliance-related data.
• Hidden dependencies on retired applications 
• Stakeholder resistance

Retain

This cloud migration strategy proposes retaining certain applications on-premises because they are either unsuitable for cloud migration or not yet ready for it. The Retain approach is suitable for applications that need more time for adaptation or are not aligned with the organization’s current cloud strategies.

Pros

• Reduced Immediate Costs
• Keeps critical or sensitive applications running without disruption
• Allows gradual cloud adoption 
• Provides additional time to plan migration

Cons

• Requires continued investments
• Higher complexity due to fragmented IT environment
• Dependency risks

Relocate

The Relocate Strategy leads organizations to move entire workloads or applications to the cloud without modifying the underlying architecture. This approach uses virtualization to migrate on-premises virtual machines (VMs) to the cloud. The Relocate migration strategy is a perfect pick for companies with legacy apps, seeking rapid cloud adoption, and budget constraints. 

Pros

• Ideal for tight deadlines or urgent projects
• No need for significant redesign
• Gain scalability and resilience of AWS infrastructure without a complete overhaul

Cons

• Limited Cloud Optimization
• Migrated workloads may not perform as efficiently in the cloud as they did on-premises
• Might require rearchitecting later

Pro Tip: When selecting from the 7 Rs, assess not only the immediate feasibility and cost but also the long-term scalability for your business requirements.

5. Establish a Migration Factory Approach

Getting an AWS migration factory up in action can simplify the process by organizing teams, tools, and methods in a way that makes everything more efficient.

Instead of diving headlong into the cloud migration process, this approach renders a clear, repeatable structure for handling migrations, bit by bit. By facilitating consistency, it helps streamline the whole lifecycle and minimize the chaos that often comes with migrations. 

To establish a migration factory, you can:

• Prepare the data. 
• Build servers. 
• Validate the migration.
• Run boot-up tests. 
• Move to the new server instances.

One of the biggest advantages is that you can learn from each migration you complete. After every project, you can look back, see what went well, what didn’t, and apply those lessons to the next migration. 

Pro Tip: Start with less critical applications or systems when first rolling out your migration factory. That way, your team gets the hang of the tools, processes, and possible challenges without risking anything too important.

6. Migrate in Phases

Pursue AWS migration in phases. Adopting a phased approach helps deal with complexity and reduces disruption that tags along in a core-critical process like cloud migration. Each phase must be segregated into steps, including preparation, planning, migration execution, and subsequent optimization in the cloud environment. 

Pro Tip: Set up a well-architected AWS Landing Zone. The tool enables a foundation for a secure, scalable, and compliant AWS environment, ensuring that all resources in subsequent phases are governed by best practices from day one.

7. Optimize Post-Migration

After migrating to AWS, it’s of critical importance to fine-tune your setup and get the best performance and cost benefits.

Start by monitoring key metrics like response times and resource usage to build a baseline. Use AWS tools to track anomalies and ensure everything runs smoothly. Regularly review your resource usage to right-size instances and cut down on unnecessary costs. 

As a further step in ensuring AWS post-migration support, set up auto-scaling and load balancing to handle traffic changes efficiently. Optimize storage by using caching, tiered storage, and deduplication strategies. For faster data delivery and better user experience, leverage CDNs to cache frequently accessed content.

Ensure your network setup is reliable, with fault-tolerant designs and efficient connectivity. Embrace DevOps practices like automation and Infrastructure as Code to simplify deployments.

Pro Tip: Companies offering cloud migration solutions are well-versed in AWS’s native tools and resources. Partner with cloud managed service providers that can help optimize your set-up for maximum leverage.

Other Key AWS Cloud Migration Best Practices

1. Ensure your team is well-trained on AWS, focusing on key areas like security, configurations, and cost management. 

2. Create clear roles and rules for managing your AWS environment. Having a solid governance model translates into everything staying organized, secure, and aligned. 

3. Protect your cloud environment by implementing encryption, managing access controls, and running regular security audits. Proactive measures go a long way in minimizing risks.

4. Optimize your cloud costs by leveraging reserved instances, right-sizing your resources, and using tools to monitor and manage spending. 

5. Design your AWS setup thoughtfully by choosing the right instance types and configurations to fit your business needs. A strategic approach ensures better performance and savings. 

Why Unified Infotech for AWS Cloud Migration Services?

Thinking of migrating to AWS Cloud?

Migrating business workloads is a mission-critical undertaking, requiring precision, detail, and strategy. With Unified Infotech, your business lies in the safe hands of professionals who understand the AWS cloud ecosystem like the back of their hands. By sharpening our focus on your existing IT infrastructure, compliance requirements, and growth imperatives, we build an actionable, tailor-made cloud migration strategy that prioritizes:

• Scalability on the go. 
• Data democratization. 
• Iron-clad security. 

We understand businesses often find themselves on thin ice while exploring the most effective way to do AWS cloud migration. Our AWS migration consulting services are rooted in a customer-first mindset. We work as an extension of our team, understand your vision, and help envision your AWS environment with tailored recommendations and actionable industry insights.

Our certified AWS experts go beyond being just another AWS cloud partner and take AWS migration to the next level today and tomorrow with our deep expertise, tailored performance-driven strategies, and holistic approach.

Let’s discuss your move to the cloud today!