AWS Training and Certification Blog

Accelerate your AWS migration with AWS Training and Certification

Cloud migration presents an opportunity for organizations to enhance performance, reduce costs, and drive innovation with AWS. However, successful migration requires more than just technical expertise—it demands organizational alignment, clear strategy, and well-trained teams. While technical skills are crucial, the most significant challenges often stem from company culture and people.

Organizations that successfully migrate to the cloud share three key elements:

  1. Consolidated senior leadership with a clear direction and aligned expectations
  2. Detailed migration goals with a timeline and next steps
  3. A top-down commitment to training teams to operate comfortably in the cloud

AWS Training and Certification provides resources for each migration phase to help address common challenges and accelerate your journey. In this blog post, we’ll share those resources, equipping your organization with the essential knowledge to operate your IT infrastructure efficiently and confidently.

Assess phase

All cloud migrations begin with understanding your current IT portfolio, including applications, workloads, and data. During the assessment phase, organizations dive deep into several critical initiatives: identifying business goals and objectives, determining appropriate migration strategies (from simple rehosting to complete refactoring), understanding technical requirements and pain points, and estimating costs and potential savings.

Common challenges include a lack of awareness of the 200+ AWS services that can be used to design a destination infrastructure, lack of alignment or buy-in on a migration strategy, and unclear dependencies of existing systems. To address these challenges, AWS offers the following training resources:

  • AWS Technical Essentials provides a comprehensive introduction to AWS products, services, and solutions to help technical teams understand migration possibilities.
  • AWS Cloud Essentials for Business Leaders is a free course that can help facilitate informed discussions on migration options with line of business (LOB) professionals, IT leaders, and executives.

By providing both technical and business-focused training options, AWS helps organizations build the cross-functional expertise needed for a thorough and effective assessment phase.

Mobilize phase

The mobilization phase involves putting the necessary resources, tools, and processes in place to carry out cloud migrations effectively and efficiently. Once you finish your assessment, you can prepare both the organization and the technical environment for the cloud migration.

Common challenges organizations face when preparing for the mobilization phase include lack of experience using migration tools and uncertainty about cloud environment configurations. To mitigate these challenges, we recommend the following actions:

  • Establish a core team responsible for overseeing migration efforts.
  • Develop a comprehensive migration plan with timelines, milestones, and key deliverables.
  • Set up the cloud environment and ensure correct and secure configurations.
  • Begin migrating pilot applications to test your cloud migration strategy and process before implementing a full-scale migration.

To successfully execute a migration, the core migration team can leverage the following AWS Training resources to upskill on relevant migration technologies:

  • AWS Migration Essentials can help stakeholders across all roles to learn methodologies for discovering, planning, performing, and tracking migrations using AWS tools and services.
  • Migration Foundations Knowledge Badge Readiness Path is a great resource for technical leaders to learn how to simplify and accelerate AWS Cloud migrations. This learning path includes courses, knowledge checks, 2 self-paced labs, and a knowledge badge assessment.

Migrate and modernize phase

The migrate and modernize phase includes the actual movement of applications, workloads, and data. This phase builds upon the proper planning and preparation in the preceding phases. However, common challenges during this phase include understanding how to optimize application performance, incorporate scaling, manage costs, and follow security and compliance best practices.

During this phase, take the following steps to set your organization up for success:

  • Use insights and lessons learned from pilot migrations to migrate applications and workloads at scale.
  • Optimize application architecture to take advantage of cloud-centered features and services.
  • Monitor performance, security, and cost of your new cloud environment, and adjust as necessary.
  • Continually improve and innovate by adopting new cloud technology and capabilities as they become available. This phase is ongoing, as continuous improvement is critical to cloud transformation. Once you’ve migrated, you can optimize and innovate to get the maximum value from the cloud.

After initial migration of applications and data, you can begin modernization efforts to optimize your infrastructure for the AWS Cloud, unlocking techniques such as serverless computing, seamless scalability, and dynamic allocation of IT resources to changing workloads. Successful cloud migrations require teams to understand and effectively manage AWS environments, whether optimizing applications post-migration or maintaining them as-is.

Optional trainings relevant during this phase include:

Next steps

Success in a cloud migration requires an ongoing commitment to learning and development from all levels within your organization. After the initial migration, continued training is essential to ensure your internal engineering team maintains and expands their cloud expertise. This knowledge is crucial not only for effectively managing migrated infrastructure but also for leveraging cloud capabilities to drive innovation and modernization initiatives.

Optional AWS Training and Certifications for ensuring the ongoing success of your cloud environment include:

  • AWS Certified Cloud Practitioner is an entry-level AWS Certification that provides a foundation for AWS Cloud concepts, services, and terminology for individuals in technical, managerial, sales, or financial roles.
  • AWS Skill Builder provides access to 600+ free courses and learning plans. Develop your team’s cloud expertise further to transform your business and maximize your cloud investment with a Team subscription.

If you aren’t already connected to an AWS sales specialist, you can contact us to request to speak with one. These specialists can help you plan your migration with relevant tools and inform you of potential funding mechanisms.

Start your organization’s cloud migration journey today by exploring these AWS Training and Certification resources, and empower your teams with the knowledge and skills needed to drive a successful cloud transformation.

Authors

Chloe Gorgen is an Enterprise Solutions Architect at HAQM Web Services, advising AWS customers in various topics including security, analytics, data management, and automation. Chloe is passionate about youth engagement in technology and supports several AWS initiatives to foster youth interest in cloud-based technology. Chloe holds a Bachelor of Science in Statistics and Analytics from the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, with a minor in Data Science.

Justin Lin is a Small & Medium Business Solutions Architect at HAQM Web Services. Dedicated to designing and developing innovative solutions that empower customers, Justin has been dedicating his time to experimenting with applications in generative AI, natural language processing, and business intelligence. Justin holds a Bachelor of Science in Computer Science from University of Washington Seattle.

Srividhya Pallay is a Solutions Architect II at HAQM Web Services based in Seattle where she supports small and medium-sized businesses and specializes in generative AI and games. Srividhya holds a Bachelor’s degree in Computational Data Science from Michigan State University College of Engineering, with a minor in Computer Science and Entrepreneurship.