How Can You Shorten the Duration of Your Cloud Migrations?

by Stephen Molloy.

We had lots of great questions from the attendees during our last TransitionManager demo webinar and I wanted to take a few moments here on the blog to address one that stood out.

It’s a common theme for many migrations, but one of the hardest to optimize so I thought it might be of interest to a larger audience:

“When migrating different components, aggregating the migration steps for each component is not enough: some optimization should be done to shorten the duration of the migration. How is it managed? Can the tool help?”

Great question.

TransitionManager turns all of the important data about an IT environment into an actionable and optimized migration plan. In most cases, this data comes from many sources and it is a lot of work to get that data into an efficient migration plan that has the lowest possible risk.

To get to an optimized migration plan the tool makes it easy to gather critical business and technical requirements.  Applications, server, storage and other device data can be aggregated through automated and manual processes directly into the tool. In addition to pre-defined data fields, TransitionManager has over 90 custom fields to store company-specific data. Each of these data fields impact the decisions to be made to the design of an appropriate migration plan.

The TransitionManager dependency analyzer then produces a visual, interactive map of all IT assets and their relationships:

With this interconnected view of the IT environment, the tool will suggest the most efficient groups of assets that can be bundled and moved together based on their interdependencies. The available resources allocated to the migration,  downtime considerations, key constraints, and other business facts gathered in the aforementioned data fields are also used as actionable decision points during this process. Using this key intelligence from the platform ensures that the most efficient migration schedule is developed, and tailored to organizational needs.

Once the migration events and groups have been confirmed, TransitionManager runbooks save time and sequencing migration tasks and assigning owners to those tasks.

Runbooks can also be set to provide estimated task-timing information and estimated durations for tasks and sub-tasks. In this view you can see not only the overall time of all tasks within the move event, but also the “critical path” tasks and how long that string of tasks may take. Task duration and timelines are powerful both before the event and after for making improvements to the process.

Join us for our next webinar.

We’d love to have you take TransitionManager for a “test drive” and answer your questions!