Migrations are where infrastructure, applications and people all have to move at once, without disrupting the business. I have been delivering them for over 16 years, and I still love migration projects.
I help organisations plan and deliver migrations end to end, from discovery and dependency mapping through to cutover, hypercare and decommissioning.
Types of Migration I Deliver
- Data centre migrations and exits: consolidation, relocation, colocation moves and DC integration
- Cloud migrations: moving workloads to Azure or AWS, including hybrid models
- Application migrations: including business critical and payments applications in banking
- IT M&A integration and separation: user, application and infrastructure migrations, Day 1 readiness and TSA exit
- Infrastructure refresh: server, storage and network changes, and end of life remediation
Selected Experience
- Data centre integration, Ireland: led the IT workstream of a €60m data centre integration for a global data centre provider
- IT M&A integration, insurance: two year integration programme for an international insurance group, with around 950 users migrated
- Payments application migrations, banking: migration of payments applications for a Tier 1 bank
- Disaster recovery and resilience: DR programmes across banking, healthcare and higher education, which shape how I plan every migration (see IT Disaster Recovery Consulting)
How I Work
- Discovery: inventory, dependency mapping and business priorities
- Strategy: choosing the right approach for each workload, from lift and shift to rebuild
- Planning: waves, cutover plans, rollback criteria and stakeholder communication
- Testing: rehearsals and validation with application owners before go live
- Cutover and hypercare: controlled execution with clear go or no go decisions
- Closure: decommissioning, documentation and lessons learned
Every migration plan includes a tested rollback. If it cannot be undone, it is not ready.
Migration Resources
Practical articles from my own projects:
- Are you ready for your migration?
- The 7 phases of a migration project
- Data centre migration strategies and methods
- VLAN stretching
- Issue tracker
- Most common migration issues
- Risks of physical moves
- Big data migrations: high level planning
- Big data migrations: testing
Planning a Migration?
Whether you are exiting a data centre, moving to the cloud or integrating after an acquisition, I can help you plan it properly and deliver it without surprises. Get in touch.