Preparing for Migration: Aligning Stakeholders, Cataloging Systems, and Building Your TCO Baseline
Migrating to AWS isn’t just about moving workloads—it’s about building a foundation for success. After establishing strategic alignment in Part 1, the next step is to prepare your organization for the journey ahead. This preparation phase ensures that people, processes, and costs are accounted for before the first workload is migrated.
Identifying Stakeholders and Goals
Every cloud migration is a cross-functional initiative. Without clear ownership and goals, projects risk delays and misaligned expectations.
Who should be at the table?
- Executive Sponsors – Provide funding and set business priorities.
- IT Operations & Security Teams – Manage infrastructure and enforce compliance.
- Finance/Procurement – Track costs and model savings.
- Application Owners – Know the dependencies and requirements of their workloads.
- End Users – Provide input on usability and business value.
Practical Example: A healthcare provider migrating its patient management system involved compliance officers early in the process. This avoided surprises when HIPAA regulations required specific encryption and auditing features on AWS.
Inventorying Applications and Dependencies
A clear map of your environment is essential to avoid breaking business-critical workflows.
Steps to build your inventory:
- List all servers, applications, and databases currently in use.
- Identify dependencies (shared services, APIs, latency-sensitive apps).
- Tag workloads by business criticality (mission-critical, important, low-priority).
Practical Example: A logistics company discovered that its warehouse management software relied on a legacy database hosted on a separate server. By mapping dependencies, they avoided migrating the app without its supporting database—saving weeks of downtime.
Cost Modeling and TCO Baseline
Without a baseline, it’s impossible to measure ROI. Establishing a Total Cost of Ownership (TCO) gives you a before-and-after comparison of on-prem vs. AWS.
How to calculate TCO:
- On-Prem Costs: Hardware, licensing, data center rent, utilities, staff overhead.
- Cloud Costs: Compute, storage, data transfer, reserved vs. on-demand pricing.
- Tools to use: AWS Pricing Calculator, AWS Migration Evaluator.
Practical Example: A financial services firm calculated that running their core trading app on-prem cost ~$120,000 annually (hardware, power, staffing). By rehosting to AWS EC2 with Reserved Instances, they reduced their annual spend to ~$78,000 while gaining resilience and scaling options.
Mapping Workloads to the AWS 6 Rs
At the end of this preparation phase, workloads should be assigned a migration path using the AWS Migration Strategies (6 Rs):
- Rehost (Lift-and-Shift) – Move as-is.
- Replatform – Minor adjustments (e.g., move database to RDS).
- Repurchase – Replace with SaaS.
- Refactor – Redesign for cloud-native.
- Retire – Decommission unused apps.
- Retain – Keep on-prem temporarily.
Practical Example: A media company split workloads into categories:
- Website CMS → Replatform (moved to Amazon RDS + EC2).
- Legacy accounting software → Retire (replaced with SaaS).
- Customer-facing video platform → Refactor (moved to serverless architecture).
Key Takeaways
- Migration success begins with people and goals, not just servers.
- Application inventorying prevents costly oversights.
- TCO modeling justifies the migration to executives and avoids budget shocks.
- The 6 Rs framework ensures each workload has a clear migration path.
What’s Next
In Next Part, we’ll apply the AWS Well-Architected Framework pillars directly to on-premises systems. This structured review highlights gaps in security, reliability, performance, and cost optimization before workloads move to AWS.
📘 Read: Applying the Well-Architected Pillars