AWS MAP Assess Phase: Building Your Migration Readiness Assessment

What Are the Six CAF Dimensions?

The Governance perspective reviews your cloud operating model, portfolio management approach, and compliance requirements. It asks whether your organization has the processes to manage cloud resources at scale. Budget allocation, procurement workflows, and regulatory frameworks all fall under this dimension.

The Platform perspective examines your target architecture readiness. Can your team design and operate cloud-native infrastructure? Do you have experience with Infrastructure as Code, container orchestration, or serverless patterns? Gaps here determine the technical training needed during the Mobilize phase.

The Security perspective evaluates identity management, data protection, threat detection, and incident response capabilities in a cloud context. On-premises security practices do not translate directly to cloud environments. The MRA identifies where your security posture needs adaptation.

The Operations perspective assesses monitoring, event management, patch management, and backup and recovery processes. Cloud operations require different tooling and practices than traditional data center operations. This dimension ensures your ops team can maintain service levels after migration.

How Is the Portfolio Discovery Conducted?

Portfolio discovery is the technical counterpart to the MRA. While the MRA evaluates organizational readiness, portfolio discovery catalogs your infrastructure. Every server, database, application, and network dependency is documented. This inventory becomes the foundation for migration planning.

AWS provides several tools for discovery. AWS Application Discovery Service collects configuration data, usage patterns, and network connections from your on-premises environment. AWS Migration Evaluator (formerly TSO Logic) analyzes this data to project costs and recommend instance types. Third-party tools like Cloudamize or Movere can supplement where needed.

Discovery typically reveals surprises. Organizations frequently find 20-30% more servers than their asset management systems record. Shadow IT, forgotten development environments, and undocumented legacy applications surface during the scan. Accurate discovery prevents scope creep during the migration execution phase.

Each discovered workload receives a preliminary migration strategy based on the 7Rs framework: Retire, Retain, Rehost, Relocate, Repurchase, Replatform, or Refactor. This initial classification is directional — it will be refined during Mobilize. But it provides enough detail to estimate the migration effort and timeline.

What Goes into the Business Case?

The directional business case is the financial document that justifies your migration investment. It compares the total cost of ownership (TCO) of your current environment against the projected cost of running on AWS. This is not a simple price comparison — it accounts for infrastructure, licensing, labor, facility, and opportunity costs.

On the current-state side, the business case captures hardware depreciation schedules, data center lease costs, power and cooling expenses, software licensing fees, and staff costs for infrastructure management. Many organizations underestimate their true on-premises costs by 30-40% because these expenses are spread across multiple budgets.

On the AWS side, the business case projects compute, storage, networking, and managed service costs based on your discovered portfolio. It applies appropriate pricing models — On-Demand for variable workloads, Reserved Instances or Savings Plans for steady-state. MAP credits are factored in, typically reducing the projected AWS cost by 15-25%.

The business case also quantifies business value beyond cost savings. Improved agility, faster time to market, reduced downtime, and scalability benefits are estimated based on industry benchmarks. These factors often outweigh the direct cost savings, particularly for organizations in competitive markets.

How Is Assess Phase Funding Structured?

AWS provides financial support during the Assess phase, typically covering 5% of your projected first-year ARR as cash or credits. For an organization expecting $500,000 in post-migration ARR, that translates to $25,000 in Assess funding. This covers the cost of the MRA, portfolio discovery, and business case development.

The funding is usually disbursed to your AWS partner, who delivers the Assess phase work. Some partners supplement AWS funding with their own investment, particularly for larger opportunities where the Mobilize and Migrate phases will generate significant revenue.

To access Assess funding, your partner submits the MAP opportunity through AWS Partner Central. The submission includes your estimated migration scope, projected ARR, and target timeline. AWS reviews and approves the funding within a few weeks. Understanding MAP credits and funding across all phases helps you plan the full financial picture.

What Deliverables Should You Expect?

The MRA report is the primary deliverable. It presents your readiness scores across all six CAF dimensions, identifies specific gaps, and provides prioritized recommendations. Each gap includes a remediation action, owner, and target timeline. This becomes your pre-migration improvement roadmap.

The portfolio inventory is the second major deliverable. It includes a complete list of servers, databases, and applications with their specifications, utilization data, and interdependencies. A dependency map showing application-to-server and server-to-server relationships is particularly valuable for migration wave planning.

The directional business case is the third deliverable. It presents the TCO comparison, projected savings, MAP credit estimates, and a migration timeline with key milestones. This document is used to secure executive approval and budget allocation for the migration program.

Some Assess engagements also produce an initial landing zone design and a preliminary migration wave plan. These additional deliverables accelerate the transition into the Mobilize phase by providing a head start on the operational foundation work.

What Common Mistakes Happen During the Assess Phase?

The most frequent mistake is treating Assess as a formality. Some organizations rush through the phase to reach migration faster. This creates blind spots — undiscovered dependencies, underestimated complexity, missing skill gaps — that surface as costly delays during execution.

Another common error is limiting stakeholder involvement. The MRA requires input from IT leadership, security teams, finance, operations, and business unit owners. When only the infrastructure team participates, the assessment misses organizational and business readiness gaps that derail migrations.

Under-investing in portfolio discovery is a third mistake. Organizations that rely on existing CMDB data without running actual discovery scans miss shadow IT and undocumented systems. With 72% of global workloads now cloud-hosted according to Flexera, your environment likely includes cloud resources that need to be accounted for alongside on-premises infrastructure.

How Does the Assess Phase Handle Compliance and Security?

Compliance requirements shape migration planning from the start. During Assess, your partner identifies which workloads handle regulated data — financial records, health information, personally identifiable information — and maps the compliance frameworks that apply. This mapping prevents migration decisions that violate regulatory obligations.

The Security dimension of the MRA evaluates your current security controls and identifies which ones need cloud-specific equivalents. On-premises firewalls become security groups and NACLs. Physical access controls become IAM policies and identity federation. The gap analysis ensures no security requirement falls through the cracks during migration.

For regulated industries, the Assess phase may include an AWS compliance pre-assessment. AWS maintains compliance certifications for dozens of frameworks including SOC 2, ISO 27001, HIPAA, PCI DSS, and GDPR. Understanding which AWS services and configurations meet your requirements influences the target architecture designed during the Mobilize phase.

What Role Does the Partner Play During Assess?

Your AWS partner leads the Assess phase execution. They facilitate the MRA workshops, deploy discovery tools, analyze the collected data, and author the business case. A qualified partner with the AWS Migration Competency has conducted dozens or hundreds of these assessments and brings pattern recognition that accelerates the process.

The partner also manages the MAP administrative requirements. They submit the opportunity through AWS Partner Central, coordinate with your AWS account team, and ensure deliverables meet the standards required for Mobilize phase approval. This program management role is as important as the technical assessment work.

Choose a partner who will stay engaged beyond Assess. The insights gathered during this phase are most valuable when the same team carries them into Mobilize and Migrate. Switching partners between phases creates knowledge loss and often requires re-work. An experienced AWS migration services partner like Opsio provides continuity across all three MAP phases.

Moving from Assess to Mobilize

The Assess phase concludes with a formal readiness review. Your AWS partner presents the MRA findings, business case, and recommended next steps. AWS reviews the deliverables and approves the transition to the Mobilize phase, which unlocks the next tier of MAP funding.

A well-executed Assess phase typically identifies 15-25 remediation actions across the six CAF dimensions. These actions become the work plan for the Mobilize phase. Organizations that enter Mobilize with a clear gap remediation plan complete it 30-40% faster than those that discover gaps along the way.

The Assess phase sets the trajectory for your entire migration. Invest the time, involve the right stakeholders, and ensure your AWS migration services partner conducts a thorough evaluation. The weeks spent in Assess save months during execution.

For hands-on delivery in India, see see how Opsio compares to other cloud MSPs.