What does the cloud promise to us?Where does it fail?
How much control do I need? what are my business requirements? Do I have SLA requirements?Do I have federal/state requirements (e.g. HIPPA)?Do I need to customize by environments? WSPs? Branding? Will I need to have SSO capabilities?Is VPN a requirement?How much data?Is search customization needed?current future storageRealistic migrations expectations and planmigration downtime?Auth requirementsBDC (external data)URLsInternal/external DNS
House Vs. Apartment metaphor You own the house you can change cable providers color outside of house change the rooms add rooms a standalone structureYou rent the Apartment inside of room don’t have to worry about trash don’t have to cut the grass a site within a structure
The cloud any structure outside of the company’s own infrastructureThe cloud can be SaaS or IaaS
Outline business requirementsAudit your current environment Space WSPs BrandingDetermine cut-over date and work backwards along time line (this is an project exercise as much as technical function)Copy Database and any customizations (if needed) to new environment (stale data)Copt Service Application databases (some can not be copied or migrated)Test new environment with people who know your data. More than functional test (testing can use AAM or HOST files)Update farm as needed to working condition. Test again and continue cycle as neededSet DNS TTLs (2 days)Set change management freeze (1 day)Set current environment to read-only (day of)Copy data to database (and service application DBs) or online as needed for refresh data (alternate methods will be needed if large of complex situations)Set DNS IP to new locationWait for DNS (not all DNS servers on Internet honor lower TTLs)Last round of testingCompleted migration