For Public cloud migration, Request for Information (RFI) and Request for Proposal (RFP) you get the knowledge on service capabilities of a provider and costing of service elements respectively. RFI usually precedes an RFP in the cloud buying journey.
The below Request for Information (RFI) guide will help you clarify Cloud Migration Service Provider’s capabilities for professional service offerings, for public cloud IaaS & PaaS. This will also help you to fit them into your short and long term cloud strategy for professional (e.g. cloud advisory, assessment, migration, etc.) and managed services.
If you are seeking professional services for public cloud migration, for any mission critical application (ERP, Oracle EBS, JD Edwards, etc.) you may want to benchmark against certified partners to ensure your ease of migration and your cloud success.
You can customize the content below as per your organization’s cloud transformation needs.
How this blog will help:
- Learn more about your cloud migration vendor, before issuing an RFP
- Know the right set of questions to ask before engaging with a cloud vendor
- Benchmark / Comparison of vendor responses
Why use this Guide to Assess a Cloud Migration Service Provider?
No two providers offer identical services. IT Decision makers are finding it challenging to identify potentially suitable implementation partners for public cloud IaaS & PaaS, as the service provider ecosystem for cloud grows substantially. They can use this guide to ensure they do not fall for tall marketing claims from service providers and assess their capabilities through this guide.
Use this even before you request for a proposal from potential partners or even your existing Cloud Migration partner for new cloud projects. Answers from respondents will bring you more confidence in the service provider’s capabilities. You can benchmark the responses from the respondent vendors to clarify their capabilities in professional services for public cloud IaaS and PaaS.
Public Cloud Migration Services Providers: Areas to Assess
Below we explain questions to ask potential migration partners in each of the phases:
Cloud Readiness Assessments
- Do you offer cloud readiness assessment service?
- Which frameworks/methodologies are used to support assessments?
- What areas do your assessments cover (for example, skills, IT processes, and application landscape and security services)?
- With respect to discovery activities for each of the areas you highlighted in above explain which tools are used for which purpose, and what level of interaction is needed.
- Describe the extent to which you are able to assess the customer’s network connectivity for cloud readiness.
- What are the typical deliverables associated with cloud readiness assessments?
- Beyond a readiness assessment, do you assist clients in redesigning their IT operating model to optimize for public cloud? If so, explain the scope of this service.
Public Cloud (IaaS & PaaS) Environment Design
1. Do you offer public cloud (IaaS & PaaS) environment design service?
2. Provide a high-level overview of your environment design services
3. To what extent are design services dependent on assessment activities covered in 2.1?
4. How do you reflect the strategy and principles of the customer?
5. Landing zones
6. Resilience (both for cloud-native and lift and shift migrations), including multicloud
7. Cloud network design and integration to customer WAN
8. Build and deploy pipelines (CI/CD)
9. Security infrastructure
10. Tagging structure
11. Identity and access management (including integration to customer)
12. Provisioning capabilities
13. Configuration management
14. Hybrid infrastructure
15. Compliance requirements
16. Governance (establishing policies and designing for compliance to these policies)
Public Cloud Workload Migration Planning
1. Do you offer workload migration planning services?
2. Which migration options do you typically deliver (such as rehost, refactor, rewrite)? Please clearly explain which migration options are delivered by your staff, and which migration options are delivered by partners
3. Describe migration planning, highlighting typical milestones.
4. Describe the toolset typically used to analyze and plan migrations, including application discovery and dependency mapping.
5. Explain how migrations are planned in conjunction with customer constraints.
6. Clarify how migration testing is included.
7. Clarify how risks are identified and managed in migration planning.
8. Provide RACI matrix to demonstrate the split in migration planning responsibilities between Provider and Customer.
Environment Delivery and Migration Execution
1. Do you offer environment delivery and migration execution service?
2. Do you offer a highly automated ‘migration factory’ approach?
3. Do you offer customized migration using professional services teams and most appropriate tooling for the job?
4. Describe the toolset used to govern and manage migration project delivery
5. Other approaches
Further Professional Services
1. Describe your professional services to support activity related to the following: Amend/remove the items below to reflect your needs and interests.
3. Cloud strategy
4. Public cloud provider selection
5. On-premises/hybrid infrastructure strategy (both data center and network)
6. Cloud-native application design and development
7. Solution architecture
8. Serverless computing
9. Containers and container management
10. DevOps transformation
11. Site Reliability Engineering
12. Workload Optimization (highlight optimization areas e.g. cost, security, reliability)
13. Training
Public Cloud Solution Accelerators
Outline any solution accelerators you offer to address customer requirements. Add rows as required.
Industry Specific Solutions
Outline any Industry Specific Cloud Solutions you offer for [INSERT YOUR INDUSTRY VERTICAL].
Add rows as required.
- Industry solution 1: “Add your brief solution description”
- Industry solution 2: “Add your brief solution description”
Application Modernization
- Provide your definition of “application modernization” and provide a brief overview of your capabilities to support application modernization.
- To what extent do you rely on partners to assist with application modernization?
- How do customers most commonly use you to support application modernization, and what are typical business outcomes attributed to the types of application modernization services you provide?
Conclusion
Use the information above as a RFI to ask IT Convergence capabilities for Public cloud infrastructure services (IaaS & PaaS), and we will be glad to respond.
