Introduction to governance for AWS large migrations

Pratik Chunawala and Bill David, Amazon Web Services (AWS)

January 2023 (document history)

For most enterprises, the biggest challenges of a large migration are organizing the people and processes required to accomplish this task. This typically involves organizing people from many different teams that have competing priorities. You must align your organization to the same goals and form a cross-functional large migration team. A migration team can be entirely internal to your organization, or it might include AWS Professional Services, AWS Partners, or other third-party consultants. This team must be empowered to meet regularly in order to plan and cut over your migration waves according to your migration forecast. Building a strong governance model for your large migration project helps the migration team to effectively track migration activities, follow a set of identified processes, and establish an escalation mechanism when obstacles are not addressed.

This guide introduces approaches to governance that are specific to large migrations. These approaches are designed to help you manage processes and people and establish a rigorous top-down approach. It serves to inform prospective migration teams about the key components of a well-defined large migration plan. It also highlights key details and actions that any project management team should quickly define and develop as part of this type of effort. Each section of the guide includes examples. In addition, we recommend that you review the Project governance playbook for AWS large migrations, which provides more prescriptive detail about the migration steps and provides templates that your team can use.

Guidance for large migrations

Migrating 300 or more servers is considered a large migration. The people, process, and technology challenges of a large migration project are typically new to most enterprises. This document is part of an AWS Prescriptive Guidance series about large migrations to the AWS Cloud. This series is designed to help you apply the correct strategy and best practices from the outset, to streamline your journey to the cloud.

The following figure shows the other documents in this series. Review the strategy first, then the guides, and then proceed to the playbooks. To access the complete series, see Large migrations to the AWS Cloud.

Intended audience

This guide is intended for project executive stakeholders and for the project management office. It is intended help you build a robust governance model for your migration team at the start of a large migration project. This guide discusses the what and why of a governance model. For more information about the how, we recommend you see the Project governance playbook for AWS large migrations.