AWS Migration Assessment: Cloud Readiness Guide

An AWS migration assessment systematically evaluates your current infrastructure, applications, and organizational readiness to identify risks, estimate costs, and build a realistic migration roadmap before you commit resources to execution. Skipping or rushing the assessment phase is the most common cause of migration delays, budget overruns, and post-migration performance issues.

This guide walks through the six phases of a comprehensive migration assessment, the tools AWS provides, and how to interpret results to make informed migration decisions.

Why Assessment Comes First

A thorough migration assessment prevents the costly surprises that derail cloud migration projects — unknown application dependencies, underestimated data volumes, and compliance gaps that only surface during execution. Organizations that invest 4-8 weeks in assessment typically complete their migrations 30 to 40 percent faster than those that skip directly to execution, because assessment reveals blockers early when they are cheaper to address.

Six Phases of Migration Assessment

A comprehensive AWS migration assessment covers infrastructure discovery, application analysis, business case development, risk evaluation, readiness scoring, and roadmap creation.

Phase 1: Infrastructure Discovery

Inventory all servers, databases, storage systems, and network components using AWS Application Discovery Service or third-party tools. Capture compute specifications, utilization data, operating systems, and installed software. This phase answers: what do we have?

Phase 2: Application Dependency Mapping

Map how applications communicate with each other, which databases they depend on, and what external services they integrate with. Dependency mapping prevents the migration equivalent of pulling out a supporting wall — moving one application without its dependencies. AWS Application Discovery Service captures network connections between servers to build dependency maps.

Phase 3: Business Case Development

Compare the total cost of ownership between your current environment and AWS. AWS Migration Evaluator analyzes your infrastructure data and produces a detailed cost comparison including compute, storage, licensing, facilities, and operations costs. The business case quantifies expected savings, identifies the payback period, and builds executive support for the migration investment.

Phase 4: Risk and Compliance Evaluation

Identify regulatory requirements, data residency constraints, security obligations, and contractual limitations that affect migration decisions. For regulated industries, map compliance requirements to AWS controls and identify gaps that need remediation. Learn about AWS security and compliance consulting.

Phase 5: Migration Readiness Scoring

Score your organization's readiness across the six AWS Cloud Adoption Framework perspectives: Business, People, Governance, Platform, Security, and Operations. Each perspective is scored on a maturity scale that identifies gaps requiring attention before migration execution.

Phase 6: Roadmap Creation

Produce a phased migration plan that sequences workloads into waves based on complexity, dependencies, and business priority. Each wave includes timelines, resource requirements, rollback procedures, and success criteria. The roadmap becomes the execution guide for the Mobilize and Migrate phases.