To identify server and application dependencies, you need to analyze the network connectivity data, port connections, system, and process information on the hosts. Depending on your tool, you can visualize all the contacts from a server to identify its dependencies, or you can run queries to list all the servers running a specific process, using a particular port, or talking to a specific host.

To group your servers and applications for migration scheduling, you need to identify patterns in your host configurations. Often, some prefixes are embedded in the server hostnames to signify their association with a particular workload, business unit, application, or requirement. Some environments might also use tags and other metadata to associate such details with the host.

To right-size your target environment, you can analyze the performance metrics for your servers and applications:

• If a server is over-provisioned, you can revise your right-size mapping information. You can also optimize this process by leveraging the utilization data for the server/application instead of the server specifications.
• If a server is under-provisioned, you might assign a higher priority to the server to migrate to the cloud.

Depending on the environment, the type of data that's captured during the discovery process might vary. The data analyzed for migration planning is to determine target network details such as firewall configuration and workload distribution and also the phase, in which the application will be migrated.

You can combine this insight with the availability of your resources and business requirements to prioritize your cloud migration workload. This insight can help you in determining the number of servers to be included as part of each cloud migration sprint.

Based on the discovery and analysis of your cloud migration portfolio, you can determine an appropriate cloud migration strategy for your applications. For instance, servers and applications that are less complex and running on a supported OS might be suitable candidates for a Lift and Shift strategy. Servers or applications that run on unsupported OS might need further analysis to determine an appropriate strategy.

In a cloud migration project, discovery, analysis, and planning are tightly integrated. You are performing a full discovery of your cloud migration portfolio and analyzing the data to create a migration plan. By the end of the analysis phase, based on your analysis and the details you've gathered from business owners, you should be able to do the following for each server/application that is part of your cloud migration portfolio:

• Choose a migration strategy for the server/application, depending on your organization's cloud adoption strategy. You may be limited to specific choices within retaining, retire, repurchase, rehost, replatform, and refactor.
• Assign a priority for migrating the resource to the cloud. Eventually, all the resources that are part of the cloud migration portfolio may migrate to the cloud, but this priority will determine the urgency of that migration. A higher priority resource might move earlier in the migration schedule.

• Document the business driver for migrating the resource to the cloud, which will drive the need and priority for migrating the resource to the cloud.

Let's look at migration planning in more detail.