A data center migration into the cloud is often a daunting business initiative that can take years as you transition your existing hardware, software, networking, and operations into a brand new environment. In our roles with Google Cloud’s Professional Services organization, we work side by side with customers to collaboratively architect and enable data center migrations into Google Cloud. Over the years, we’ve participated in multiple migration journeys, and devised a general approach. Along the way, we’ve stumbled across a lot of complexities and learned a lot of lessons. In this blog post, we provide a high level overview of our recommended data center migration process. Then, in future blog posts, we’ll provide a more detailed view into the engineering and program management migration aspects of a migration.

The migration journey

Every data center migration has a reason behind it—something like the desire for cost savings or to become more cloud native. This results in a business objective such as “migrate n data centers to Google Cloud by this date.” Regardless of your motivation, the common challenge is how to enable a successful data center migration while effectively managing risk.

To help, we’ve developed a repeatable migration approach that consists of four phases: Discovery, Planning, Execution and Optimization. For most data center migrations, leveraging this repeatable framework can help identify assets, minimize risk using a multi-phased migration approach, enable deployment and configuration, and finally, optimize the end state.

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