In the previous section, you learned about different migration strategies and grouped your application in order to apply the appropriate migration technique. Since you may need to perform and manage multiple applications in the cloud, it's better to set up a cloud Center of Excellence (CoE) and standardize this process with a cloud migration factory.

The cloud CoE includes experienced people from various IT and business teams across the organization that act as a dedicated cloud team focused on accelerating the building of cloud expertise in the organization. The cloud migration factory defines migration processes and tools, as well as the steps that need to be taken, as shown in the following diagram:

As shown in the previous diagram, the cloud migration steps include the following:

• Discover: Discovery of cloud migration portfolios and on-premise workloads
• Analyze: Analyze discovered data and workloads
• Plan: Plan migration to the cloud and define the migration strategy
• Design: Design the application as per the migration strategy
• Migrate: Execute the migration strategy
• Integrate: Integrate with dependencies
• Validate: Validate functionality after migration
• Operate: Plan to operate in the cloud
• Optimize: Optimize your workload for the cloud

One of the initial steps of a cloud migration project is to assess and prioritize the applications for migration. To accomplish this, you need to get a complete inventory of the IT assets in your environment to determine which servers, applications, and business units are suitable for migrating to the cloud, prioritize the migration plan, and determine a migration strategy for these applications. Let's drill down each step and learn more about them.